A phone signal led Delhi cops to a dusty Haryana village. What they found cracked a year-old cold case

He wooed the teenage girl with gifts he’d allegedly stolen or bought with the proceeds of his crime during their courtship. Soniya didn’t care; she was in love.

Her family objected to this affair. Soniya didn’t listen to them.

They married in 2007. Pritam was 23 while Soniya was only 16. She was so in love that she never realised that her newly wed husband was an addict and never intended to mend his criminal ways.

They settled not far from their old neighbourhood, keeping their roots in Outer Delhi’s Alipur village.

However, their relationship soured quickly.

Pritam would return home high on drugs. He would, police found out, regularly beat up Soniya as well. “She found out he was involved in criminal activities… He would often be on the run from the police or get jailed,” said a police officer close to the investigation.

“This is what she told us,” he said.

To escape his wrath, especially after his violent outbursts, Soniya would often leave her home and go to her sister’s house 45 kms away in Ganaur, Sonipat.

DCP (Crime) Harsh Indora had said, “Pritam had been to jail many times for illegal possession of weapons, robbery, theft, and kidnapping, among others… because of this, the atmosphere at home was not pleasant.”

Seeking solace, Soniya turned to social media. She would mouth lyrics to popular songs on videos, which would often elicit responses from various men through direct messages.

Pritam felt she would easily find love if she left him, said a police officer. That’s why whenever Soniya fought with him and asked to let her go, he refused to. “She tried leaving him several times, but Pritam would often cajole her or win her over with promises to do better…,” the officer said.

For almost 18 years, the two remained at an impasse. They would have three children together — the oldest a 17-year-old son.

Then one day in 2023, everything changed.

A young man, Rohit, sent her a direct message on Instagram. He had watched one of her reels. Soniya was illiterate, but that didn’t stop her. According to the police, she would text using a voice-to-text app and listen to messages sent to her through a text-to-voice app.

When exactly the flirty exchanges deepened into love, she could not say. The police officer said that they did ask. She didn’t remember, she told the police.

However, she told the police, her urgency to leave her husband grew by the day. “Rohit promised her that he’d marry her if she left Pritam,” the police officer said. “However, Pritam kept resisting, and the more Pritam resisted, the more desperate the two became to be together.”

Rohit was 26 — six years younger than Soniya. He worked as a cab driver, ferrying passengers between Sonipat and Delhi. With a sharp nose, side-swept hair, a goatee, and slightly sad-looking eyes, Rohit was a welcome change from Soniya’s mustachioed husband.

However, Rohit was no stranger to crime either. Police said he had been booked for murder and attempt to murder — one in which he’d killed a fellow villager as revenge for killing his brother, and another in which he almost killed a man during the 2016 Jat reservation agitations.

Rohit had been to jail several times, the police said, but managed to get out. Police said he had four FIRs against him – one in 2016, two in 2019, and another in 2024.

In fact, police said, it was Rohit who planted the seed to get rid of Pritam by murdering him.

On July 2 last year, after yet another fight at home, Soniya left for her sister’s place in Rohit’s cab. During the ride, she allegedly asked him to kill her husband. He told her they would need Rs 6 lakh to arrange the hit job, Soniya told the police. “It will require two people to do the job,’’ Rohit told Soniya.

It was too expensive, Soniya told the police, so she dropped the idea. Rohit, however, didn’t give up the idea.

However, before he could organise anything, he had to go underground to escape arrest in an Arms Act case, police said.

In the three days Soniya stayed at her sister’s in Ganaur, she mulled over the idea. It had to be done, but the question was who would do it?

Things escalated on July 5. Pritam turned up unannounced at her sister’s home and wanted to take her back with him. “(He) started arguing with her, then insulted her and went away from there,” said DCP (Crime) Harsh Indora.

That fight was the final trigger.

“That day, she told her sister Deepa’s brother-in-law, Vijay, that Pritam had made her life hell and would have to be finished,” said the DCP.

“Vijay told her it would cost Rs 1 lakh. She told Vijay she would give Rs 50,000. In the evening, Pritam returned in his auto to pick her up, requesting her to come back — but she had already made up her mind to get him killed,” DCP Indora said.

Soniya subsequently hatched a plan with Vijay, the police said, to keep her husband in Ganaur that night and finish him off.

After dinner, Soniya went up to the terrace with the children to sleep. A few hours later, she would hear Pritam’s screams echoing in the darkness.

Police said when she asked Vijay about her husband the next morning, he told her he had killed Pritam and dumped his body in a drain near Agwanpur village. He even sent her images and videos he had taken of Pritam’s body to her social media, which he deleted later, police said.

All that was left was to get rid of the remaining evidence.

After the murder, police said, Soniya gave Pritam’s phone to Rohit and asked him to destroy it. Soniya sold Pritam’s auto rickshaw and used the Rs 4 lakh she got from it to pay Vijay, police said. She also repaid some of the loans her husband owed.

Then, playing the role of the worried and hassled wife, she walked into the Alipur police station and told the police her husband had not come home for the last two weeks. It was July 20, 2024.

Ten days before Soniya approached the Alipur police station, Pritam’s body had been discovered by the police in Sonipat. However, nobody knew it was Pritam. With no one coming to claim the body, it was cremated.

There was no headway in the Alipur Police’s search for Pritam. The case gathered dust in the police records room.

In that year, Soniya’s relationship with Rohit crumbled as well. “She went back to him and reminded him of his promise to marry her, but Rohit suddenly changed his mind. He had fresh demands. He wanted her to leave her three children, if she wanted to marry him,” a police officer said.

“She couldn’t agree to that”.

Police said Soniya and Rohit went their separate ways. Rohit got married to another woman in April this year, while Soniya started a relationship with someone new. Interestingly, Soniya continued to post reels on her social media.

The case was dead till something unusual happened. Away from the investigation into Pritam’s mysterious disappearance, Delhi Police’s Crime Branch was running routine checks on habitual criminals in and around Alipur.

They found out that one of the habitual criminals had gone off the grid for a year. In fact, he had been missing for so long that he had been declared a proclaimed offender in one of the cases against him. While checking his whereabouts, police discovered the missing persons report registered at Alipur police station by Soniya last year.

However, when officers put his phone on surveillance, they noticed it was still active. The team followed the trail to Jaji, a dusty village in Haryana’s Sonipat. They didn’t find Pritam. Instead, they found Rohit. Rohit had lied to Soniya and had not destroyed Pritam’s phone.

From there, all the police had to do was pull the string and watch their web of lies and betrayal come undone.

DCP Indora said, “The team had found that Pritam’s phone was up and running at Jaji village. The team started to keep covert watch over the persons using the phone, and it was found that the user had a criminal background. The team conducted raids, and Rohit, who was using the phone, was nabbed and examined.”

When questioned, Rohit first attempted to obfuscate the truth by telling police that he had bought the phone from a stranger. However, when questioned further, he cracked. Subsequently, Soniya was arrested and questioned. After denying the claims, the police said she admitted to the crime.

Vijay is yet to be arrested, said police.