New Delhi: Two Uttar Pradesh men use their “doctor” skills to chop up their 40-year-old tenant. An Andhra man packs the woman he murdered in a zip pouch. A mother-son duo in Delhi kills a man and packs his body into a refrigerator.
In the month that followed Aftab Amin Poonawala’s arrest for having murdered and then brutally disposed of his partner Shraddha Walkar’s body in the jungles of Delhi’s Mehrauli, several “gruesome” murders made national headlines.
The murders that got highlighted in the national media came from across the country and ranged from body parts being found in a suitcase to dumping them in a borewell.
Experts say there’s nothing new about the brutality of such crimes and that humans have a long history of such killings.
“Such murders happen quite often, the media has just woken up after the Aftab Poonawala’s case,” Anuja Kapur, a criminal psychologist and advocate, told ThePrint. “I think this is a short-term mass hysteria wave the media is trying to ride. For some time, every single murder where a body was chopped in pieces will make it to the news. It is similar to what happened in 2012 when the media created a wave of rape news”.
She was referring to the 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder when a woman was gang-raped and assaulted in a moving bus in Delhi’s Munirka.
Here’s a look at 12 murders that made headlines since 12 November, when Poonwala was arrested for Walkar’s murder.
Also Read: Bones recovered from Mehrauli jungle are of Shraddha Walkar, forensic report finds
12 ‘gruesome’ murders
Ever since Walkar’s killing came to light, several murders that involved the chopping up of body parts made national news.
On Sunday (18 December), Jharkhand Police arrested Dildar Ansari for having murdered and chopped Rubika Pahadin, a tribal woman and Ansari’s live-in partner of two years, into several pieces in Sahibganj.
On the same day, Rajasthan Police arrested Anuj Sharma for allegedly having murdered his aunt, Saroj Sharma, on 11 December in Jaipur. In this case, the suspect allegedly used a marble cutter to dismember his victim, packed up the pieces in a suitcase, and then scattered them near the Delhi highway.
On Friday (16 December), two men —Umesh Sharma and Parvesh Kumar Sharma — were arrested in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad district on charges of murdering and dismembering 40-year-old Ankit Khokar in Modinagar on 6 October. Khokhar was Umesh Sharma’s tenant, reports said. The suspect allegedly used the skills he acquired while working as a “compounder at an orthopaedic clinic” to chop up the body, the report said.
On Wednesday (14 December), a farmer in Haryana’s Rewari district found the body of an unidentified woman. The head and torso of the woman were allegedly found in a field while her limbs were packed in a suitcase.
On 9 December, the “highly decomposed” body of an unidentified woman was found in a suitcase in a drain in Delhi’s Punjabi Bagh.
On 8 December, Police in Bihar’s Bhagalpur arrested 62-year-old Shakil Miyan for the murder of 45-year-old Neelam Devi. The suspect allegedly cut the victim’s limbs, ears, and breasts after the murder.
On 6 December, a 21-year-old man identified as Vitthal Kulali allegedly killed his father Parshuram Kulali after a heated argument in Karnataka’s Bagalkote. The suspect then allegedly chopped the body into 10-15 pieces to dump it in a borewell.
On the same day, Visakhapatnam Police arrested a man identified only as Rishi allegedly having killed a woman identified as Dhana Lakshmi over a monetary dispute. The city police claimed that the suspect packed the victim’s body parts in a zip pouch and kept it inside a drum in his rented house for 1.5 years.
Likewise, November also had a litany of such reports — most of them reported after Poonwala’s arrested,
In a case eerily similar to the Shraddha murder case, a mother-son duo allegedly killed a man in East Delhi’s Trilokpuri. The victim, identified as Anjan Das, was allegedly given sleeping pills and his body parts were kept in the refrigerator after the murder. The duo was allegedly arrested on 28 November.
On 20 November, West Bengal Police arrested a mother and son duo for having allegedly killed an ex-navy man, Ujjwal Chakraborty, over an argument over the payment of examination fees in Baruipur in South 24 Parganas. The victim’s body parts were allegedly found floating in a pond.
On 19 November — just over a week after Poonawala’s arrest — Uttar Pradesh Police detained Prince Yadav in Azamgarh for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Aradhana Prajapati. Yadav allegedly killed Prajapati after he found out that she was married, beheaded her, and cut her body into pieces.
On 18 November, Punjab Police arrested 36–year-old Mohammad Ishtiyaq for having allegedly strangled 28-year-old Mohammad Saleem with a muffler and then packed the body in a suitcase.
According to the police, Ishtiyaq had plans to stow the body in a train but changed his mind after seeing policemen at the station and instead left the body near the station entrance.
He was nabbed using CCTV footage.
‘Hyped’ cases
Murders are not uncommon in India — according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)’s statistics, the country reported 29,272 murder cases in 2021. This means that about 80 murder cases were reported on a daily basis.
It’s not the murder itself but the method of disposing of the body that has really caught public attention, say experts.
Criminal psychologist Kapur explains the psychology behind chopping up victims’ body parts.
“The oozing blood flowing out of a victim’s body gives a feeling of strength to the perpetrator, who had no control or superiority over the victim when he or she lived,” Kapur said. “On top of it, the media’s publicity of such criminals also encourages other people with diabolical intentions to commit murder in this style. It has become a fashion. Aftab was a copycat of Dexter, now others are trying to follow the same. It’s insane”.
She was referring to the drama series Dexter, an American drama series about a forensic technician and serial killer who lives a double life.
In addition, the easy availability of weapons is also to blame, believes K. Jaishankar, principal director and professor of criminology and crime sciences at the International Institute of Crime and Security Sciences in Bengaluru, Karnataka.
“The phenomenon is not new, but the easy availability of precision and surgical knives both online and offline has increased the supply of weapons to criminals”, he told ThePrint.
He also said that in most of the cases involving body dismemberment, it’s anger that drives instinct.
“A criminal resorts to chopping off body parts in order to vent their anger against someone they had a disturbed relation with, which usually develops over a long period of time,” he said. “The more the anger, the more body parts are chopped.”
This, he says, makes it difficult for investigators to crack the case.
“Body parts are scattered around and DNA matching consumes time and resources,. In such cases, it’s extremely difficult to file a chargesheet in 90 days,” he said. “As we go by the principle ‘innocent until proven guilty’, the proof of guilt consumes police’s (time) to a great extent. It (also) gives such perpetrators a little more time to hide, evade or roam freely.” he said.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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