Aftab's judicial custody extended for 14 days in Shraddha Walkar murder case

New Delhi, Dec 23: A court in Delhi extended on Friday the judicial custody of Aftab Amin Poonawala, accused of slaughtering his live-in partner Shraddha Walkar, by 14 days.

Poonawala, alleged to have strangled Walkar and chopped her body into pieces, was produced before the court through video conference. Metropolitan Magistrate Vijayshree Rathore extended Poonawala's judicial custody till January 6.

Bones found in Mehrauli forest area belong to Shraddha Walkar

DNA extracted from bone pieces recovered in the Mehrauli forest area by the Delhi Police has matched with samples of Shraddha's father Vikas Walker, clarifying that they belonged to her. The police had recovered 13 bone pieces from the area while searching for Walkar's body parts. She was allegedly strangled and her body sawed into 35 pieces and disposed of in various parts of the national capital by her live-in partner Aaftab Amin Poonawala.

''The police has received the DNA report of the bones found. The DNA of the bones matches with the DNA samples of Walkar's father,'' PTI quoted sources as saying. The bone samples were sent for DNA analysis to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory. The report of Poonawala's polygraph test was submitted to the police by the forensic sciences lab on Wednesday.

The beginning of the end

Aftab and Shraddha met through a dating app Bumble in 2019 and later moved in together at a rented accommodation in Chhatarpur. Her parents were against the inter-faith relationship and had stopped talking to her after she decided to move to Delhi with him.

Poonawala allegedly strangled Shraddha and chopped off her body into 17-18 peices which he kept in a 300-litre refrigerator for almost three weeks at his residence in South Delhi's Mehrauli before dumping them across the city over several days.

The police said that the couple would fight regularly over issues such as marriage and who would bear the household expenses. On May 18, he strangled her to death and then set out to buy a knife and fridge. Following a missing person's complaint filed by Shraddha's father on November 10 as her daughter was untraceable for over two months, the police arrested Aftab, six months after the crime took place.