Uttarakhand murders: Body of Delhi woman recovered

Her boyfriend’s body was recovered from an area under the Purola police station on October 30. However, the police had cremated the body after failing to identify it. Later, the police matched the body with the photographs of her boyfriend and confirmed that the recovered body was of the same person. The police have lodged a murder case in this connection.

“We have recovered the decomposed body of the Delhi woman from the Yamuna near Damda. The woman’s family members are on way to Purola police station to identify the body,” Uttarkashi SP J R Joshi told the Indian Express on phone.

According to SP Joshi, efforts were on to trace the body in the river Yamuna for the last two days. “On Thursday, we pressed Uttarakhand’s State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) into service to recover the body from the river,” Joshi further said.

The woman and her boy friend had reached Chakarata on October 22 and checked into a hotel there. On October 23, they checked out and went to Tiger Falls in a shared taxi driven by main accused Raju. After this the couple went missing  and the woman’s father lodged a complaint with the Delhi’s Saket police station area. While the woman used to teach in a private school, her boyfriend was a painter. They lived in a rented house in Delhi’s Lado Sarai area.

In the first week of November, a team of Delhi police arrived Dehradun in search of the driver Raju Das in connection with the mysterious disappearance case of the Delhi couple. Police sources said the Delhi police had suspected Raju’s role in the case after knowing that the cell-phone set, which belonged the Delhi couple, was in his (Raju) possession. “Raju had started using the cell-phone set by inserting a new SIM card into it,” a source in the Dehradun police said.

During interrogation, Raju confessed that he and accomplices Guddu, Bablu and Kundan had killed the couple on their return from Tiger Falls on December 23. Incidentally, all four accused are natives of the same Tungarauli village near Tiger Falls.

Police claimed the four accused first targeted the boyfriend and strangulated him to death. Later, one of the accused allegedly raped the Delhi woman before she was killed. While the body of her boy friend was pushed off a cliff, they took the woman’s body two km ahead from there and threw it into the Yamuna.