Gurugram bed-box case: Man killed wife for refusing sex, held

The police said that Rajesh, a cab driver, had fled to Salasar Dham in Rajasthan after killing his wife, and stayed there for five days, before leaving for Amritsar to stay with his uncle.

A week after the decomposing body of 30-year-old Babita, was found hidden in a bed box in a house in Gurugram’s Sector 46, the police on Saturday night arrested the prime suspect, her husband Rajesh Kumar, from Amritsar for allegedly murdering her on the morning of January 21.

The bed-box where the woman’s decomposing was found at a house in sector-46 Jal Vihar Colony, in Gurugram, on January 26, 2019.(HT File)

The police said that Rajesh, a cab driver, had fled to Salasar Dham, a temple in Churu district, Rajasthan, and stayed there for five days, before leaving for Amritsar to stay with his uncle.

Shahid Ahmed, station house officer (SHO), Sector 50 police station, said Rajesh told the police that he strangled his wife to death because she refused to have sex with him, saying she was too embarrassed to do so, with her father, who was visiting, staying in an adjacent room in their house.

“Rajesh was upset and accused his wife of having an affair and confronted her,” Ahmed said. “On January 21, around 5.15am, he took her to the house of Dinesh Kumar, his employer, whose house was 10 metres away. The couple had an argument, following which he strangled her with her dupatta (stole) in a fit of rage. He hid the body in the bed box in Dinesh’s house and fled to Rajasthan,” he added.

Dinesh used to go to Narnaul on the weekends and leave his house keys with Rajesh. He returned to his house on January 21, the day of the alleged murder, and did not notice anything amiss for five days, while he continued to sleep on the same bed.

On January 26, he smelled something rotting. Assuming it was a dead rodent, he opened the bed box to find Babita’s decomposing corpse and reported the incident to the police.

The police said Rajesh told Babita’s father that he was taking her to Behror for a few days, leaving her five children (from an earlier marriage) with him. Her father had come from Gaya in Bihar a fortnight before the day of the crime and had rented a room across the street from the couple’s house. He had stayed at their house for a few days, said inspector Jai Bhagwan, who was the investigating official, but has since been transferred out of the city. An autopsy revealed that she was one-and-a-half months pregnant.

The police said Rajesh was suspected to be hiding in Behror (Rajasthan), the village he is from, but a team sent to the village did not find him there.

SHO Ahmed said the police got a lead when Rajesh’s uncle told an investigating official over the phone that his nephew was visiting him in Amritsar.

“A team arrested him from Amritsar on Saturday night and brought him back to the city. A city court sent him to two days police custody,” SHO Ahmed added.

Babita’s father had told the police that his son-in-law suspected his daughter of having an affair and did not allow her to use a mobile phone.