Delhi: Woman shot dead near Shahdara park, man last seen with her picked up for questioning

“A man was murdered when he allegedly stepped in to stop two men from harassing the woman and rebuked them,” said an officer. The two men were later arrested.

The police said they are looking into all possible angles, including motives borne out of revenge or relationship issues.

Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (Shahdara) Neha Yadav said they received a PCR call on Monday night regarding a woman lying dead on the road. “The local police found a woman lying dead on a service road near Sunder Nagari,” Yadav said, adding that there were two bullet injuries on the body. Sources said she had been shot on her cheek and chest.

The body of the woman, who has been identified, was brought to Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital for postmortem examination.

The woman’s relatives told The Indian Express that she was living with her elder sister for over a month after their mother’s death.

When contacted, the elder sister said, “We were worried about her… and wanted to get her married. We even asked her if she liked someone but she never gave us a straight answer.”

“We had planned to send her to Jaipur to live with our pregnant sister… she was supposed to leave on the 17th, after our mother’s chalisvi,” the sister added. Chalisvi is a funeral rite observed after 40 days of a person’s death.

The elder sister was informed of the woman’s disappearance at midnight, while she was working at a private hospital. “My daughter called me to say that (she) wasn’t home… My uncle later told me that she had been talking to someone over the phone before she left home,” she said.

Claiming that the woman often went out in the evening to meet her friends, the family reasoned that they were not immediately worried when told that she was not at home.

Late night, the police showed up at the house, asking the family to provide the woman’s photograph and a description of the clothes she was wearing. “The police did not confirm anything to us until morning,” the woman’s maternal aunt said.

By 7 am on Tuesday, the victim’s neighbours raised an alarm. “(The woman’s) photograph was being circulated on WhatsApp groups in the area. Everyone was saying that she was the murder victim,” said the sister.

Panicked, the family rushed to nearby hospitals and police stations before getting to know who had been killed. In front of the mortuary on Tuesday, the family awaited the postmortem examination to take place.