Shraddha murder: Friend recalls helping her file FIR against Aftab

MUMBAI: A friend of Mumbai woman Shraddha Walker, who was brutally murdered by her live-in partner in Delhi this year, in May, claimed on Friday that he helped her file a police complaint against Aftab Amin Poonawala.

Speaking to ANI, Rahul Rai, who identified himself as a friend of Shraddha's, said, "In 2020, we (him and other friends) helped her file an FIR after she reached out to us for help saying Aftab beat her. We took her home."

"The police officer suggested detaining Aftab for interrogation but she said such things happen in a relationship," he added.

Rahul claimed the day after she filed the complaint, the police called her over to the police station. She said she was scared that he (Aftab) would kill her as he has already tried to kill her before and had beaten her multiple times, her friend recalled.

"Aftab would lock her up at home and talk to other girls," Rahul claimed, adding that Shraddha had also talked to him about her partner's drug abuse. "When we tried to reach out to her again, she said, 'don't worry, such things happen'. We did not have any sort of contact ever since," Rahul said, adding that he never imagined that her live-in relatinship with Aftab would meet such a horrific fallout. Rahul's statemenb came on a day a team from Delhi Police reached Mumbai as part of their probe into the Shraddha murder case.

Meanwhile, the Delhi Police on Friday held a high-level meeting to review the ongoing investigation into the murder case. The meeting was chaired by joint commissioner of police Meenu Choudhary and featured senior officers from South Delhi.

The police are also looking into a case of a body found in the East Delhi area in June this year, and directed officers to make arrangements for matching its DNA with the recovered body parts of the Mumbai woman, sources said.

Officials at the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) have also been instructed to preserve the DNA from the body parts found in the East Delhi area, police added. A separate Delhi police team on Friday visited the former workplace of the accused, Aftab, in Gurugram in search of the remaining pieces of his girlfriend's body and the weapon used to kill her.

Aftab confessed to killing his live-in partner and chopping her body into 35 pieces before dumping in the forests of Chhatarpur. He was allegedly high on marijuana when he committed the crime, sources said.