Three held for killing man, dumping his body on street

A 24-year-old woman, along with her sibling and a friend — both of whom are transgender persons, according to the police — were arrested Monday for allegedly killing a man and dumping his body on a street near the man’s home in north Delhi’s Wazirabad five days ago, the police said. The man worked with a weekly newspaper in north-east Delhi.

The man’s body was found near the stairs of a house by its occupants around 8am on September 11. By afternoon, police had identified the body as that of Sahil, 23, after circulating his photographs on local WhatsApp groups. The man’s mother saw the pictures and identified the body, said deputy commissioner of police (north) Anto Alphonse.

After finding strangulation marks on the body, the police registered a murder case and scanned CCTV footage in which three women were seen dumping the body after bringing it in an auto.

“We focused our probe on the auto-rickshaw. After minutely scanning the footage, we found “Ansul Ki Gaddi” written on the rear of the auto. We examined nearly 200 autos and finally found the driver who had dropped the women along with the body,” said an investigator.

His questioning led them to a hospital and from there to the suspects, police said. A senior police officer said Sahil’s friend Priya and two trans women assaulted and strangled him at their home in Shastri Park during a fight that started when he began making sexual advances at Priya in front of the other two after consuming alcohol on the night of September 10.

“When she tried to stop his advances, Sahil burnt her with a cigarette. The three of them got angry over this and a fight broke out. The trio then throttled him to death with his belt,” said a senior police officer associated with the murder case.

DCP Alphonse said the trio panicked and decided to take Sahil to a hospital. They hired an auto-rickshaw and reached Jag Pravesh Chandra Hospital. But they did not go in for fear of being arrested.

They hired another auto-rickshaw and told the driver that the “unconscious man” was their relative and they wanted to take him home as the doctors told them his chances of survival were minimal, police said.

The three took Sahil’s body into a lane some 100 metres away from his home. After the driver left, the trio dumped Sahil’s body near the stairs of a house and fled.

When the police found the auto driver, he told them he didn’t know that it was a body he was transporting. The police scanned the footage from hospital and found the women in it.

“We showed their images to Sahil’s family and they identified one of them as his girlfriend. A police team searched her home but found her and her two relatives missing. We traced them to their village in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur,” the DCP said.