There was no body. The bones recovered from a shuttered hotel compound near Vadodara were burnt beyond DNA sampling. Over 40 of the 128 witnesses, including the complainant, turned hostile. What helped convict Police Inspector, AA Desai, of murdering his live-in partner, Sweety Patel in 2021, instead, was a melted Mangalsutra and a set of gold bangles that forensic experts found recognisable from photographs of the woman wearing them. That, and the testimony of a man with every reason to have moved on from her life– her first husband based in Australia, who told the court that his former wife had confided to him years after their own divorce, that she was anxious her relationship with Desai would never be formalised.
On Thursday, the 8th Additional Sessions Court at Vadodara at Karjan, held that the chain of events — a black Compass Jeep, parked unusually in reverse inside the house of the police inspector the morning after his ‘wife’ had supposedly vanished in the night and his mobile-phone trail to an abandoned hotel, where the charred body was found– was no coincidence. The court held that Desai — a Police Inspector who was posted with the Special Operations Group (SOG), Vadodara District, at the time of the offence — had strangled Sweety Patel inside their own home and then, with the help of a friend– Kiritsinh Jadeja– who owned a defunct hotel, burnt what was left of her.
In a 72-page order, Additional Sessions Judge MB Kotak sentenced Desai to life imprisonment for murder and causing disappearance of evidence along with a fine of Rs 2 lakh. His co-accused, hotelier and politician Kiritsinh Jadeja, was convicted for helping dispose of the evidence and sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment, also with a Rs 2 lakh fine. Jadeja’s bail bonds stand cancelled and he has been taken into custody to serve his term, while Desai– arrested on July 25, 2021 — remains in judicial custody as he has throughout the trial.
A marriage no one was told about
The case, arising from the FIR lodged at Karjan Police Station, centred on a relationship Desai’s own family said it knew nothing about. According to submissions made by Additional Public Prosecutor R M Gyanchandani, Sweety –who had already been married twice before, first to Hetash Pandya and later, briefly, to a man she met online– married Desai in 2017 in a small ceremony at a temple, exchanging garlands before a handful of witnesses. Desai was, by then, already married to another woman in Ahmedabad, with whom he had a daughter. Sweety moved in with Desai and resided in Vadodara, where the couple had a son in 2019. Neither Desai’s parents nor his socially recognised wife, the judgment records, were told that Sweety existed.
The prosecution’s case was that Sweety’s persistent demand– that Desai divorce his legal wife and give her social acceptance –triggered a fight on the intervening night of June 4 and 5, 2021, inside their locked house, during which Desai strangled her. He then, prosecutors alleged, drove her body in a private Jeep to an abandoned hotel at Atali village owned by Jadeja, where it was burnt in the hotel compound near Jadeja’s Hotel.
The convict drove her body in a private Jeep to an abandoned hotel at Atali village owned by Jadeja. (Express Photo)
Desai then lodged a missing-person complaint with Karjan police only six days later, on June 11. When the local investigation went nowhere, the case was transferred to the Crime Branch, Ahmedabad, on orders of the Director General of Police. A polygraph test conducted on Desai by the FSL, Gandhinagar deepened suspicion, and cell-tower and CDR data pulled both Desai and Jadeja to Atali on the evening of June 5.
Panchnamas at the site over subsequent months recovered burnt human bones, ash, a torn nightgown and, eventually, melted gold ornaments that an FSL officer matched to jewellery Sweety was photographed wearing.
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Victim’s brother too went hostile
What makes the verdict notable is the evidentiary path the court had to take to arrive at the conclusion. What made the case trickier was that of the 40 witnesses who had gone hostile were the victim’s brother Jaydeep Patel who was also the complainant in the case and the ‘first informant’ who had stated that Desai had strangled his sister fatally.
The prosecution examined 128 witnesses– the defence, led by senior advocate KM Bhatt, RD Patel and Nehal Dave, pointed out that virtually all the independent witnesses– some 38 panch witnesses to seizure panchnamas, plus the two home guards on duty that night had turned hostile in court. The brother, Jaydeep’s wife Manisha backed him. Even Sweety’s step-brother, Bhavdeep, whose statement before a magistrate had recorded Desai’s alleged confession about a scuffle over their unregistered marriage, retracted.
The judge did not treat this collapse as fatal to the case. Citing settled Supreme Court precedent, the order holds that a hostile panch witness does not by itself discredit a recovery if the investigating officer’s testimony on it stands unshaken. The order states, “But it is required to be noted that merely because panchas have turned hostile, it does not mean that the prosecution case becomes lame and loses its credibility. The recovery and other factual aspects of the panchnama can be considered in view of the testimony of the concerned Investigating Officer.”
The recovery of bones from the premises by DCB Ahmedabad in 2021. (Express Photo)
More pointed was the court’s own reading of the family’s turnaround– the order observes that Jaydeepbhai had earlier filed an application “in support of the investigation” at the time of Desai’s arrest, making “severe allegations” against him, only to reverse course entirely in court –behaviour the judgment calls “a very material circumstance” suggesting the “complainant turned hostile on the behest of (Desai)… which indicates (his) involvement in the crime.”
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On the question of the absent the body, the court leaned instead on witnesses who were not part of that ‘inner circle’ of the victim. It gave particular weight to Sweety’s first husband, Pandya, and their son Ridham, both of whom testified that Sweety had confided her anxiety about Desai’s refusal to formalise their marriage — testimony the judge found credible precisely because it came from people outside the family that had turned hostile. A friend of Desai’s, Pratik Dugrana, added that Desai had called him the very next morning, not to report Sweety missing but to help shift clothes and belongings out of the house under the pretext of relocating.
The absence of the body was addressed head-on through the doctrine of corpus delicti — that a murder conviction does not require recovery of remains, only proof “by direct or circumstantial evidence” that death occurred, based on Supreme Court precedents. The court accepted that DNA drawn from the two-year-old son Sweety had with Desai, did not match the charred bone fragments recovered at Atali– the bones were too badly burnt for profiling — but held this did not undermine the case, since the melted gold ornaments recovered from the same site were independently matched by the FSL to jewellery in photographs of Sweety.
His co-accused, hotelier and politician Kiritsinh Jadeja, was convicted for helping dispose of the evidence and sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment. (Express Photo)
The final chain, as the judgment lays it out, rested on “last seen together” — based on Desai’s own admission that Sweety was with him at midnight, his unexplained failure to search for her despite being a trained police officer, the abnormal detail of his Jeep being reversed into the compound the next morning, her mobile phone –which she used constantly –being left untouched at home, and his presence, corroborated by tower and CDR data, at Atali with Jadeja on the evening of June 5.
Under the court’s final order, valuables among the seized articles will be forfeited to the state, while Sweety’s original documents, including her passport, are to be handed to her son Ridham. The judgment records that the order will be communicated to her first husband, who resides in Australia, and to Ridham. The order does not specify the present custody or whereabouts of the younger son she had with Desai but the case record shows only that he was taken from Karjan by Sweety’s brother’s family in the days after she went missing in 2021.
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The court held a same-day hearing on sentencing before pronouncing the final order on August 14, 2026, rejecting the defence’s plea that Desai be given the minimum sentence and Jadeja a “nominal” term, and rejecting the prosecution’s separate plea for the maximum punishment against both.
The convict drove her body in a private Jeep to an abandoned hotel at Atali village owned by Jadeja. (Express Photo)
The recovery of bones from the premises by DCB Ahmedabad in 2021. (Express Photo)
His co-accused, hotelier and politician Kiritsinh Jadeja, was convicted for helping dispose of the evidence and sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment. (Express Photo)