Delhi Mercedes murder: Suspect changes statement, says girl shot self

Police on Sunday took Shubham Gupta — a Class 12 dropout, who allegedly shot dead his 17-year-old friend inside a Mercedes in southwest Delhi’s Najafgarh area — to Haridwar to recreate the chain of events before the shooting.

Police on Sunday took Shubham Gupta — a Class 12 dropout, who allegedly shot dead his 17-year-old friend inside a Mercedes in southwest Delhi’s Najafgarh area — to Haridwar to recreate the chain of events before the shooting.

Prime suspect Shubham Gupta was arrested from Saket on Friday night.

According to sources, Gupta, who had confessed to having shot Simran out of jealousy, changed his statement on Sunday and told the police that the girl turned the pistol and shot herself.

He tried to convince the cops that the girl had committed suicide, but cops confronted him with ballistic evidence.

He has reportedly been giving different versions of what happened that day to to the police for the past two days. “On Sunday, he claimed that he had an argument with Simran and she took out the pistol threatened to shoot herself. He said Simran told him that she was not lying and that could shoot herself to prove it. He claimed that when he tried to take the pistol from her hand, she turned violent and pulled the trigger,” a police source said.

Police said that after killing Simran, Gupta boarded a train to Haridwar at 4:20am the next morning. He feared that the police would trace him, so he spent the night at a friend’s place and left for the railway station in the morning. He reportedly randomly boarded a train to get out of Delhi, sources said.

“We took him to Haridwar by the same train that he had boarded. We made him sit on the same seat and after we got down at the station, we took him to the same hotel he had checked into,” a police officer said. “We have accessed records of the hotel in which he was staying with a different name. He had also fudged his identity. After he checked into the hotel, he saw the news of Simran’s murder on the television and panicked. He then went to a barber in the area and got his beard shaved and got a haircut to avoid arrest,” he added.

Sources said that he was also taken to the salon from where he got the haircut. “These links are important for the investigation. The hotel entry, the barber and train tickets will help during the trial,” a police source said. He will be brought back to Delhi in a bus by Monday, police said.

Police said that they are still not certain about the sequence of events of the day Simran was shot. They will now be questioning Nitin and Yogesh.