Mehrauli murder: Police conduct fresh searches across Delhi

NEW DELHI: The Delhi Police on Sunday conducted fresh searches across the city, including the forest areas of Chhattarpur and the locality where the accused in the Mehrauli murder case Aaftab Poonawala and Shradha Walkar used to live, officials said.

The police have scaled up the searches in Mehrauli and at Poonawala's flat in a bid to recover remaining parts of Walkar's body and the murder weapon, as his custody remand expires on Tuesday.

According to official sources, a Delhi Police team is also conducting searches in the forest areas of Gurgaon near the office where Poonawala used to work earlier.

A separate team visited the flat where they lived to collect evidence as part of the ongoing investigation, police officials said.

While the permission for Poonawala's narco test has come, investigators are running against time to get it conducted.

The test will be conducted at Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital here in Rohini, most likely on Monday as Poonawala's five-day police custody ends the next day.

Poonawala allegedly strangled Walkar and sawed her body into 35 pieces which he kept in a 300-litre fridge for almost three weeks at his house in Mehrauli before dumping them across the city over several days past midnight.

The Delhi Police had on Friday sent teams to Maharashtra, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh to hunt for evidence in the case.

According to officials, after leaving Mumbai, Walkar and Poonawala had travelled to several locations, including Himachal Pradesh, and police are visiting these places to ascertain whether any development during those trips triggered Poonawala to kill his partner.