Delhi Police has filed a chargesheet in the horrendous rape-cum-murder case of an 81-year-old woman and accused her domestic help of strangling her and then setting her body on fire before decamping with valuables from her Greater Kailash Part-II residence.
The chargesheet stated that the 21-year-old Neeraj Saki murdered the fragile and sick elderly woman after sexually assaulting her. He then tried to mislead neighbours about her whereabouts while fleeing from the house with cash and jewellery. The police investigations had nailed the lie of the accused as it pieced together the sequence of events.
The magisterial court, which has taken cognisance of the chargesheet, has sent the file before additional sessions judge Yogesh Khanna for further trial in the case. The court has now fixed September 24 to hear arguments on charges against Saki. The police in its chargesheet claimed that Saki had raped the woman before strangling her and then setting her body on fire.
The accused, who belongs to Madhubani district in Bihar, was initially arrested on charges of murdering Rekha Duggal at her GK-II residence on July 8. “After murdering Rekha, he (Saki) set her body on fire using kerosene and dragged it to an adjacent room. He then informed neighbours that Rekha had not returned from her evening walk,” the chargesheet states.
Narrating the sequence of events, the police in its chargesheet said that the accused had first raped the woman and then killed her.“He then set her body ablaze in order to destroy the evidence. He also told the court that he stole valuables from her house after the incident,” it added.Rekha’s husband KK Duggal was a former editor of UNI. He died in 2005. According to police, the accused set Rekha’s body ablaze in order to make it look that she died in a fire accident.
Police further said Saki’s plan was that when police and family members find Rekha’s charred body, they would suspect that she had died in a fire.The police also stated that during the probe when they saw smoke in the house, they suspected an AC blast and called in AC mechanics.
“The mechanics told police that the outdoor unit of the split-AC was intact and that there couldn’t have been a blast. This gave police the first clue that the fire was deliberate,” the charge sheet states. It said Saki was present in the house all this while pretending to be innocent.