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Over a month after the death of 25-year-old Arpita Tiwari at an apartment complex in Malvani, police arrested her friend Amit Hazra (28) on Sunday for allegedly killing her and destroying evidence. Hazra was produced in court on Monday and remanded in police custody until January 20, said Mumbai Police spokesperson Deepak Devraj, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Operations). He added that the arrest was made after police received results of scientific tests conducted as part of their investigation. Police said there were reasonable grounds to arrest Hazara after their month-long investigation. A senior police official said they had collected circumstantial and technical evidence against him.
Tiwari, a Mira Road resident, worked as an anchor and emcee at events. Early in the morning on December 11 last year, she had gone to Hazra’s home on the 15th floor of Manavsrhal building in Malwani with her boyfriend Pankaj Jadhav. Some friends of Hazra’s, as well as a house help, were also present in the apartment.
Police said the youngsters had consumed alcohol and retired to bed at 3 am. Tiwari, the police said, went to the bathroom between 4 am and 8.30 am. In his statement to the police, Jadhav said that when Tiwari did not come out for a long time, he used a key to open the door and did not find her inside. At 8.30 am, her body was found on the ground floor, at the bottom of a duct.
Police said her body was found in a partially undressed state, with her pants and underwear missing. A postmortem examination concluded that the death had been caused by a fall from a great height and that there were no other injuries caused due to physical or sexual assault.
Police said they faced a challenge in piecing together the sequence of events of that night, as the men were inebriated and did not remember much. The investigators also ran through other scenarios, probing whether she committed suicide or fell out of the window by accident, they said. However, on December 13, police registered a case of murder and destruction of evidence on the basis of a complaint filed by Tiwari’s mother Triveni.
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