Victim of honour killing or road rage?

A day after 20-year-old engineering student Shobhit Modi was murdered almost at the gate of his upscale Vasant Kunj colony home, the police said he might have been attacked on his way back from a shopping mall where he had gone to meet friends.

A day after 20-year-old engineering student Shobhit Modi was murdered almost at the gate of his upscale Vasant Kunj colony home, the police said he might have been attacked on his way back from a shopping mall where he had gone to meet friends.

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One of the investigators said that Shobhit could have taken either the road behind DLF Promenade, which led to the colony gate number C-5 — where he finally collapsed — or the one next to the local police station. “The road behind the mall is quite isolated.”

For establishing the sequence of event, the police are trying to find out whether he took a three-wheeler or walked to the colony gate on Thursday night after taking leave of his friends at the mall, since he had asked his driver to go back.

The police questioned more than 100 three-wheeler drivers, a transport company owner whose office is in front of the gate, an ice-cream vendor and the owner of a Mother Dairy outlet.

Investigators say on condition of anonymity that the police are treading carefully as Shobhit’s family suspected an honour-killing angle to the incident, besides the possibility of road rage. Shobhit’s family members alleged that the parents of a minor girl with whom Shobhit was last seen on Thursday night “had sent goons two months ago to beat up Shobhit in his college and had threatened his father”. The girl has already been questioned by the police.