This Article is From Dec 01, 2022

Aaftab Poonawala, In Narco Test, Says Murder In Fit Of Rage: Sources

Shraddha Walkar murder probe: Though confessions during lie-detection tests are not evidence on their own, proofs found by using these are valid

New Delhi:

Aaftab Poonawala has revealed where he threw his girlfriend Shraddha Walkar's clothes, her mobile phone, and weapon that he used to chop up her body after strangling her, police sources claimed today after his narco-analysis test. Sources said he repeated the confession he made in the polygraph test — first of two stages of the lie-detection test — earlier this week, and said he killed her "in a fit of rage" after a fight over household expenses.

Though these confessions are not evidence on their own, proofs found by using these are admissible in court.

Investigators are confident that information thus gathered will tie up the loose ends in the circumstantial evidence found so far. On the forensics front, police are yet to get a DNA test report that may establish that body parts found on Aaftab's cue are indeed Shraddha's.

For the narco-analysis, Aaftab Poonawala was brought from Tihar Jail to Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital in Rohini at 8.40 am and the test started around 10 am.

A mandatory consent form with complete details of Aaftab Poonawala and the team conducting his narco test was read out to him and got signed as part of the procedure.

The test involves intravenous administration of a drug or "truth serum" — such as sodium pentothal, scopolamine, and sodium amytal — that send the person into a kind of anaesthesia. And, in that hypnotic state, the person becomes less self-conscious and is more likely to divulge information.

The police has got curt approval for the lie-detection test after finding his responses during interrogation "deceptive".

He is accused of killing his live-in partner Shraddha Walkar in May this year and sawing her body into 35 pieces which he kept in a 300-litre fridge and dumped in a jungle near their rented flat in South Delhi's Mehrauli over several days.

He was arrested on November 12 after the woman's father, who had not spoken to her for almost a year as he was opposed to the couple's inter-faith (Hindu-Muslim) relationship, went to the cops as her friends told him she hadn't spoken to them too for months.

Right-wing Hindutva organisations and BJP leaders have alleged a communal angle to the crime, though the police haven't said any such thing. Men claiming to be from a Hindu outfit on Monday even attacked a police van carrying him and were arrested; no one was injured.

Aaftab is in judicial custody since November 26 after two weeks of police remand.

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