New Delhi: Making his brother-in-law make phone calls to the victim’s family posing as her friend, sending “call girls” to pose as her at restaurants and dhabas in Punjab from where these calls were made, and playing her old, recorded calls as messages to her family — this is how accused Delhi Police head constable Surendra Singh allegedly kept the murder of a UP woman sub-inspector a secret for two years.
According to the police, Singh, 42, also spun tales to convince the family of the sub-inspector — who was preparing for civil services exams — that she did not want to stay in touch with them.
The victim, Monica Yadav (28), who lived in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar, was last seen on 8 September, 2021. A missing report was filed on 20 October that year at Mukherjee Nagar police station. On 12 April this year, the victim’s family got a case of kidnapping registered. But there wasn’t much headway.
Then, two months ago, on the family’s appeal to the Delhi Police Commissioner, the case was transferred to the Crime Branch Unit, headed by Special Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Ravindra Yadav and DCP Sanjay Bhatia, and Singh was arrested Friday.
Even during interrogation, Singh allegedly kept misleading the police team until Saturday afternoon by giving them wrong information on where he had dumped the sub-inspector’s body.
According to the police, he has confessed, and skeletal remains have been recovered from a drain near Alipur village, and have been sent for DNA tests.
The police arrested two others in the case, 26-year-old Ravin, and 33-year-old Rajpal, also Friday.
‘He used to call her beta’
According to the police, Singh, a head constable driver, and Yadav met in 2018 when they were both posted with the Delhi Police Control Room. In 2020, the woman joined the UP Police as a sub-inspector and started taking coaching for civil services exams.
According to the police, Singh, who is married and has a 12-year-old son, kept pressuring Yadav to marry him.
“He initially acted like a father figure to her and would call her beta. When she started living in Mukherjee Nagar, he would visit her and ask her to go out with him…He began pressuring her and started controlling her life,” Special Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Ravindra Yadav told ThePrint Sunday.
Yadav allegedly started getting uncomfortable with Singh’s actions and told him off, which angered him. He was also allegedly scared that she would contact his family.
One day, he allegedly told Yadav that he wanted to take her to meet his family in Alipur, and strangled her on the way, on 8 September 2021.
“During interrogation, the accused said he killed her because she didn’t listen or give in to his demands. On the day of the murder, he took her to Burari Pushta in an auto but got off before reaching his house as Singh claimed they could walk the rest of the way. The area isn’t densely populated and it was dusk. He strangled her and then dumped her body [in the drain] along with rocks so it wouldn’t surface,” Yadav said.
Even during his interrogation, Singh didn’t spill the beans easily. “He kept telling the police team that he dumped her body in the Yamuna and we kept looking for the remains. Nearby police stations were asked [to search] with the woman’s photo, keeping in mind the time frame. It was only yesterday that he made this disclosure,” Yadav said.
Twisted plot
After killing the sub-inspector, Singh allegedly made several efforts to evade suspicion. He established ties with the victim’s family — to the extent that he would attend all their functions and would also keep asking about updates on the case at the Mukherjee Nagar police station.
According to the police, Singh allegedly roped in his brother-in-law, Ravin, threatening to leave his sister if he didn’t help out. Ravin also told the police that Singh asked him to make calls to Yadav’s family, pretending to be “Arvind with whom she had eloped”, while reading from a “script”.
Ravin claimed he had to make calls from dhabas and restaurants in Punjab and Meerut. “As Arvind, Ravin would tell her family that she was with him and she didn’t want to talk to them. He would claim they were facing threats from his family and would meet once the danger subsided,” Yadav said.
Police said Ravin made around five such calls in the last two years. Wherever he would go to Punjab to make the calls, Singh would allegedly send a “call girl” with Ravin by paying her Rs 1,000-2,000.
“He would ask them to drop off some of the victim’s documents (photocopies) at those locations so that if the family called back the dhabas or restaurants Ravin said he was calling from, the owners would verify that they saw the couple,” Yadav said.
Moreover, Singh had allegedly saved recordings of Yadav’s past conversations with him which Ravin would use during his calls to convince the family that she didn’t want to remain in touch with them.
Once the crime branch was handed over the case, they started examining the case from the start. It started with tracing the number from which the victim’s family got the calls. This number, according to the police, was registered to a fake ID of one Pawan Kumar. However, the photo used was that of accused Rajpal.
Rajpal allegedly provided the SIM card to Singh. The investigating team first interrogated Rajpal, a friend of Ravin’s. That led them to Ravin who allegedly told the police about Singh’s role.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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