That the murder of Pallavi Purkayastha, committed by Sajjad Ahmed Abdul Aziz Mughal, alias Pathan, a security guard employed with high-rise ‘Himalayan Heights’ building, was a ‘premeditated’ one could be evidenced from the chain of events that led to the brutal crime on August 9, 2012.
A native of J&K Mughal had come to Mumbai in 2009. He was among the security guards posted by the AH Enterprise Security at the Himalyan Heights building at Wadala. Mughal had been stalking Pallavi for days before he finally struck on the intervening night of August 8 and August 9, 2012.
The reconstruction the chain of events leading to Pallavi’s murder by the police had revealed thus: On the night of August 8, 2012, Pallavi came home around 11 pm and found that there was no power in her flat. She messaged her boyfriend Avik, who in turn asked her call a local electrician.
The electrician, whom she called, came along with Mughal. There was one more power failure immediately afterwards. The same electrician, accompanied by Mughal, came and restored power.
During interrogation, Mughal confessed to having “manipulated” the electricity meter in Pallavi’s flat to disrupt power supply on two occasions, forcing her to call an electrician to restore the supply.
When he accompanied the electrician on the second occasion, Mughal managed to steal the apartment keys of Pallavi kept in her living room.
Having known that Pallavi’s boyfriend was away at work and she was alone in the flat, Mughal — armed with a knife — stealthily made it into the victim woman’s flat at around 1.30 am on August 9, 2012. At that time, Pallavi was sleeping in her bedroom.
Threatening her with knife, Mughal tried to force himself upon Pallavi. She bravely resisted his advances and tried to fight back. She also screamed to draw the attention of neighbours.
An enraged Mughal slit her throat and stabbed her all over the body. He later fled the place after hiding the knife in a shoe rack of a third floor flat of the building. As Mughal ran out in his bid to flee the place, a profusely bleeding and screaming Pallavi dragged herself from bedroom to the living room where she eventually died.
When Mughal was arrested at the Mumbai Central Railway station on the night of August 9, 2012 while he was trying to flee to his home district of Baramula in J&K, there was a small bald patch on his head and there were nail scratching marks on his face, neck, chest and arms.
Pallavi – while putting up resistance to the attempts by Mughal – scratched his face and torso with her nails and ripped some hairs from his head. Incidentally, a DNA analysis of the evidence material recovered from the crime scene like the hairs and skin scrapes matched with that of Mughal. If anything, these materials proved to be a clinching evidence to nail Mughal in the case.