After a long chase in more than three States including Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, the Delhi Police managed to arrest the main accused and two others in the aspiring air hostess murder case.
On Saturday, the Delhi Police, in a joint operation with the Mumbai Police Crime Branch, claimed to have solved the murder. 21-year-old aspiring air hostess was brutally stabbed to death by her 25-year-old male friend near her house in full public view in East Delhi’s Mansarovar Park area on July 5. In the last 48 hours, 15 teams from the Delhi and Mumbai Police were chasing the main accused, Adil, alias Munne Khan, who killed Riya Gautam.
On July 3, Adil came to Delhi from Aligarh. The next day, he met his two cousins, Junaid and a 17-year-old juvenile.
Adil confessed that he was in a serious relationship with Riya Gautam for the past three years. However, for the past six months, Riya was allegedly ignoring Adil. Enraged, Adil, along with his cousins, hatched a plan to kill Riya.
“On the day, Riya was stabbed near a photo studio in the Ram Nagar Extension area, Junaid and the juvenile went to recce the area. Apart from that, they were keeping an eye on the victim’s movements. On July 5 evening, Adil called Riya to meet him. They had a heated argument when she asked him to return back the mobile phone she had gifted to him. Refusing to do so, Adil slapped her and started stabbing her. In a bid to save herself, Riya went inside the photo studio where Adil followed her and stabbed her eight times till the locals started gathering.
All this while, Junaid and the juvenile were standing close to the studio lane. After killing Riya, they all walked till the Shahdara railway station. From there, they boarded an auto to the Anand Vihar ISBT. From here they took a bus to Aligarh.
They switched off their phones 2 kilometres after the bus was en route to Aligarh, they got down and took another bus to Mathura.
Finally, they boarded a train and reached Mumbai. All this while, our team which was keeping surveillance on their technical movement combined with human intelligence got a tip-off that Adil may have gone to hide at one of his relatives house in Mumbai,” said a senior police officer privy to the investigation.
Simultaneously, teams under ACP (Seemapuri) Hareshwar Swami and ACP (Shahdara) Vichitr Veer who were in touch with the family and relatives of Adil in Aligarh got to know about his exact whereabouts.
late on Friday night, the teams nabbed the three from Bandra East.
Police said that the accused have been brought to Delhi. While Junaid has been sent to judicial custody, Adil has been kept in police custody and the juvenile has been sent to correctional home.
Police added that they have recovered the mobile phone of the victim. Nupur Prasad, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Shahdara) said, “Throughout the case, all the teams from Shahdara district were working on the murder case.”
While Khan, the main accused, is a resident of Delhi’s New Modern colony in Shahdara, the two others belong to Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh.