Two years after former cop went missing, police nab another constable, recover her remains in Outer Delhi

On Thursday, police arrested another constable, 42-year-old Surender Singh Rana in connection with the case. On Saturday, Rana led police to the spot in Outer Delhi where Monica’s skeletal remains were found under a bed of rocks.

Rana had allegedly killed and dumped Monica’s body near a drain in Pusta area, Alipur, after she rejected his overtures to enter into a relationship with him, police said. Rana was already married and suspected that Monica would tell his wife about his proposal, they added. Police said Monica considered Rana to be a “father figure”.

To throw Monica’s family members and the police off the scent, Rana had chalked out an elaborate plan for which he roped in his brother-in-law Ravin. It was Ravin who posed as Monica’s boyfriend, Arvind, and called her kin from different states, said police.

On September 8, 2021, Rana invited Monica over on the pretext of meeting his family.

An officer said, “He picked her up from her PG hostel and told her that they would go and meet his family. However, he took her to Alipur and asked the auto driver to drop them at a deserted location. He then strangled her to death.

To hide her body, he went near a drain and placed the body under a bed of rocks.”

While the family lodged a missing report on September 20, Rana convinced them that she had fled with Arvind.
“Rana had met Monica’s family before and would accompany them at all times to the police station. He would even argue with investigators at Mukherjee Nagar to prove he was on the family’s side who wanted an investigation,” said an officer.

Ravin, meanwhile, would hire women and take them to Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh, and make them pose as Monica, Special Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravindra Yadav said. “They would go to different hotels and restaurants and make calls to Monica’s family. Rana had already provided Ravin with an old voice recording of Monica in which she can be heard as saying ‘I don’t want to talk to you’. They would play the recordings and pretend before the family that Monica had fled with a man named Arvind and won’t come back,” said Yadav.

“To make their case stronger, Ravin would leave fake Aadhaar copies of Monica and Arvind at the hotels. When the police or the victim’s family would come to check at any hotel, they would find Monica’s documents. The staff would also confirm that a young couple had stayed there,” said Yadav.

Rana even managed to get a Covid vaccine certificate from a Delhi hospital to prove to the family that Monica was alive.

So foolproof was the plan that police staff in Mukherjee Nagar also thought that Monica, who had also cleared the UP Police exam and got a posting as a sub-inspector, was alive and well.

However, what proved to be Rana’s undoing was Monica’s sister approaching the Delhi Police Commissioner.
A team formed under DCP Sanjay Bhatia found that Rana was in constant touch with the victim before she went missing. “The team looked into all the calls made to the deceased, and later her family. One of these calls was traced to a SIM card which was issued on a fake name but carried the photo of a man named Rajpal. We found that Rajpal (33), a resident of Jhajjar, had got the SIM card using fake documents. He was caught from his residence,” said the officer quoted above.

During interrogation, Rajpal confessed that he had got a fake SIM card issued at the instance of Ravin. Police then picked up Ravin who pointed the cops towards Rana. Rana was interrogated multiple times and after lying initially, he confessed that he killed Monica since she rejected his proposal, and was trying to meet his wife and tell her the truth.

Police said Rana and Monica had known each other since 2018 when they were posted in the PCR unit. Though Monica had resigned from the force, police said Rana kept visiting her and was pressuring her into living with him.
Skeletal remains, believed to be those of Monica, have been sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory for a DNA profiling test.