Ghaziabad:
A retired Indian Air Force (IAF) officer and his wife were found murdered in their ransacked Ghaziabad house on Monday morning.
Bodies of Rana Pratap and his wife Dila Devi were found on the first floor of their house in Vasundhara residential colony with their hands and legs tied and mouths stuffed with pieces of cloth, police said.
Valuables were missing from the house pointing to involvement of robbers. Police suspect the robbers struck at their house past Sunday midnight.
The double murder was detected on Monday morning by the victims' son Jitendra Singh, a software engineer working in Delhi's South Extension, who lives on the ground floor.
"We have constituted a team for the probe. The air force officer and his wife were living in their house after he retired," said Superintendent of Police (City) J.K. Shahi.
Inspector Rajesh Dwivedi said the robbers entered the house from the adjoining house of Sanjay Srivastava and used a ladder to enter and leave the premises.
The retired officer, who was lately working with the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), did not respond to Jitendra's phone calls around 7 a.m., raising his suspicion.
Jitendra told police that he found the door of his parents' bedroom bolted from outside. He thought his father might have bolted it by mistake before going for yoga in the morning.
He dialed his father's mobile phone number but found it switched off. His mother's phone was also switched off. He then informed his neighbours and police.
Police forced open the door of the victims' bedroom and found them dead. Dila Devi was lying on the ground while Rana Pratap was lying on the bed.
"The arms and legs of the victims were tightly bound with cloth behind their backs, and their mouths were stuffed with clothes," said police.
They might have died due to suffocation, said a police official.
Jitendra Singh said his father retired from the IAF as a sergeant in 1993 and joined SAIL in 1994 as a technical expert in the transport department.
The victims' younger son is employed as an engineer in merchant navy.