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Meerut horror: Heart pierced, head arms and torso hacked
The autopsy conducted in the chilling Meerut murder case has found that 29-year-old Saurabh Rajput was stabbed through the heart thrice, his neck severed, his legs amputated and torso dismembered, said doctors involved in the process, throwing up shocking details in a case that has stunned the country
The autopsy conducted in the chilling Meerut murder case has found that 29-year-old Saurabh Rajput was stabbed through the heart thrice, his neck severed, his legs amputated and torso dismembered, said doctors involved in the process, throwing up shocking details in a case that has stunned the country.
Police arrested Rajput’s wife Muskan Rastogi and her lover Sahil Shukla, both 27, hours after the body was found on Tuesday stuffed inside a drum that was filled up with cement.
A panel of doctors that conducted the post-mortem on Wednesday observed that Rajput’s murder was particularly disturbing, adding that the cement damaged the body severely.
The killers stabbed him with a knife with brute force, found the autopsy.
“The heart was struck with such force that the knife penetrated deep inside, leaving it severely damaged. The legs were bent backwards, stiffened to the point they couldn’t be straightened, and the body was fragmented — the neck detached, hands cut off at the wrists, and the torso separated,” said one of the doctors on the panel.
The autopsy report has been released to the police, said the doctors.
Rajput’s body was discovered in a drum filled with dust, cement, and water, which caused the body to become embedded in the solidified mixture.
At the mortuary, doctors had to break the drum cut open and smash the cement to extract the body, a process that officials said took about an hour.
According to Meerut’s chief medical officer, Dr Ashok Kataria, the autopsy revealed that the body’s teeth were shaky and skin loose due to prolonged exposure to the cement.
He also that there were signs of an attempt to completely destroy the body by pouring wet cement over it, likely intended to damage the skin and hasten decomposition.
“The remains were not enough for a thorough examination and we could not ascertain the actual cause of death.”
The autopsy took about an hour-and-a-half, said doctors.
“We’ve been doing postmortems for years. Normally, an autopsy doesn’t stir up much emotion, but the way Saurabh was killed—it stayed with me even after I went home,” said a doctor.
Meerut superintendent of police (city) Ayush Vikram Singh said, “Police received a tip-off about a foul smell emanating from the victim’s house. Upon investigation, we found his body chopped into multiple pieces and sealed inside a water drum filled with cement.”
The suspects allegedly mixed sedatives in Rajput’s food before killing him on March 4, after he returned from London where he worked in the merchant navy at a US-based shipping company.
Police said Rastogi got into a relationship with her neighbour Shukla when Rajput got a job in the UK in 2020, leaving his wife and daughter in Meerut. The woman and her lover murdered Rajput and cut the body into 15 pieces while her daughter slept in the next room. The next day, Rastogi left her five-year-old daughter at her parents’ home and went to Shimla with Shukla.
Rastogi started planning the murder in November 2024 and exploited Shukla’s superstitious leanings to convince him to participate in the crime, said officers.
