E-Paper
Meghalaya police reveal new details on Raja Raghuvanshi's murder, Sonam's betrayal: 'Raj Kushwaha mastermind'
Sonam Raghuvanshi and Raj Kushwaha, her father's employee, are accused of murdering her husband during their honeymoon in Meghalaya on May 23 over their affair.
The Meghalaya police on Thursday revealed new details about Raja Raghuvanshi's murder, providing a glimpse of how depraved and cold-blooded Raj Kushwaha and Sonam Raghuvanshi's plan was.
Sonam Raghuvanshi and Raj Kushwaha, her father's employee, are accused of murdering her husband during their honeymoon in Meghalaya on May 23 over their affair. The police today said Kushwaha was the mastermind of nefarious plot and Sonam just went along with it.
The police said their original plan was to make Sonam disappear and concoct a story about it. They had been planning since February. Killing a woman, murdering her and passing her off as Sonam Raghuvanshi was also one of the potential plots discussed by Raj and his three accomplices.
The police also said that the killers were Raj's friends and a cousin.
“All the accused have confessed to the crime. Sonam has admitted her involvement in the plan, which was hatched just before her marriage to Raja. The mastermind behind it was Raj, and Sonam went along with the plan. The three accused were friends, one of whom is Raj's cousin,” Shillong SP Vivek Syiem told PTI video.
"Right from February, they had thought of ways in wherein Sonam would disappear. They thought about faking that she had washed away in a river. The second was to murder somebody, burn her body and pass it off as Sonam's. All these things didn't fructify. So when Raja and Sonam got married, they came for darshan to Kamakhya, the other group had also come here. The three people had come much before with the plans to eliminate Raja in Guwahati. When the plan didn't fructify, Sonam made the plan to come to Shillong. That's how this panned out," he added.
The police officer said it was Raj Kushwaha's panic that led to Sonam Raghuvanshi's arrest.
"When these people came to know that three individuals had been profiled, Raj told Sonam that it would be better to leave Indore and go somewhere near Siliguri, pretending to be a victim of abduction. It just so happened that on June 8th, when Sonam was leaving Indore, two operational teams from here were in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. When the first arrest was made in UP, Raj somehow received information that some people had been picked up, and he panicked. In his panic, he told Sonam to call her family and tell them she had escaped from an abduction. That's how the entire matter came to light in Ghazipur," he added.
