Allegations of an affair prompt Delhi police to dig up a grave

Police exhumed Saifi’s body from Y-Block graveyard in Mangolpuri, after his family levelled allegations of poisoning against his wife.

Five years after cop’s death, police file FIR on court orders

The family members alleged that she had an extramarital affair with Saifi’s cousin (Representational)

Armed with a shovel, a Delhi Police team dug up a grave in Rohini’s Begumpur Tuesday. The grave, of carpenter Vakil Saifi, is at the centre of a row between his family and his wife. Police exhumed Saifi’s body from Y-Block graveyard in Mangolpuri, after his family levelled allegations of poisoning against his wife.

Saifi and his wife had been married for 11 years. The family members alleged that she had an extramarital affair with Saifi’s cousin. “We have reason to believe that he was killed after he found out about their affair. Saifi had fallen unconscious before his death. He had confronted his cousin before he was shifted to a local hospital. He was taken to three hospitals where doctors had claimed that he had ingested drugs,” alleged Riyaz Hassan, uncle of the dead. DCP (Rohini), Rajneesh Gupta, has said that so far, “no case has been registered in the matter”.

Saifi’s parents then approached the Begumpur police station and filed a complaint. “The family members have cast suspicion that Saifi’s wife was in an extramarital relationship. The family has claimed that he was poisoned. We had sent a team to exhume his remains and later handed it over to the hospital to ascertain the cause of death,” said a police officer.

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Saifi died on March 9 at Ram Manohar Lohia hospital. His family has claimed that he was first taken to a private hospital and later to Ambedkar hospital. However, when his condition worsened, he was taken to RML hospital at the behest of his cousin and his wife.

No foul play was claimed earlier, and hence, no post-mortem was conducted, the officer said. However, his family claimed to have recovered a driver’s licence reportedly belonging to his wife, in which her husband’s name was not Saifi’s but rather his cousin’s, police said.

“After the funeral ceremonies, some of our family members were cleaning her house when the driver’s licence was found. We became suspicious, following which we checked the cousin’s car and found a mobile phone. The phone had recordings between Saifi’s wife and his cousin, through which we found that they were in a relationship,” Hassan said.

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