A curious whodunnit at posh Hudco Place flat

No one stepped out of the first floor flat, its off-white door appearing sootier than usual, to pick up the newspaper on Friday morning. Jatin Anand reports.

No one stepped out of the first floor flat, its off-white door appearing sootier than usual, to pick up the newspaper on Friday morning.

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It was in the small kitchen near the main entrance to the government-allotted flat at Hudco Place in Andrews Ganj — in which he and his wife had moved into just a year ago — that Yashkar Sinha's body, police sources said, had seemingly burned for hours before his neighbours sensed something was wrong.

"But why would he do something like this? Things between him and his wife Archana were perfectly fine," insisted Sanjeev Singh, one of Sinha's friends. "He used to call her during lunch time everyday and drive her to her parents' every week. They'd just booked a flat, a new home, in Greater Noida too."

A light drinker, Sinha had been through the Delhi University's (DU) Ramjas College and Delhi School of Economics (DSE) to pursuing a diploma from the London School of Economics (LSE) after clearing the coveted Armed Forces Headquarters Services exam.

He had 'no reason', his family insisted, 'to die such a painful death'. But neither did his wife of seven years, Archana, whom he had met and fallen in love with at her own house in north Delhi's Derawal Nagar.

"It's just…shocking. I raised her like my own daughter. I don't know what happened. I don't want to even think about it," wailed Archana's elder brother, who refused to divulge his name. Initial reconstruction of the crime scene inside the flat, locked-in from either side, yielded nothing much except Sinha's charred remains and Archana's swollen body found lying face-first on the floor at what used to be their bedroom. "Her head injury seems to have been hit by a blunt object, which is yet to be recovered. We're questioning her family members," said a police officer.

Curiously, a case of murder, based on circumstantial evidence, has been registered. But who, out of the sole two occupants of the locked flat, murdered whom and why is a question that only forensic examination can answer, police said.