Shraddha murder: old chats with pals reveal dire domestic violence

New Delhi: In the Shraddha Walkar murder case, fresh revelations of involved domestic violence incidents are surfacing after her friends' accounts. Shraddha's WhatsApp conversations, as well as Instgram chats with her friends, who told the same to the police, came up with hints that she was subjected to severe beating by her live-in partner and murder accused Aftab Poonawala, NDTV reported.

The said chats were from the days when the couple lived together in Mumbai before moving to Delhi.

In one WhatsApp chat with her colleague at work, she said that she was beaten the day before, has body aches and cannot make it to the office. Her BP was low, and she had no energy to get off the bed, she said. She had attached a selfie of her injured face.

Police have collected the screenshot of the conversation as well as her hospital admission records of that time. The records suggest that she was admitted to a Vasai hospital from December 3 to 6, 2020, and she was suffering from internal injuries, back pain, neck pain, nausea etc.

There was an Instagram chat in which she shared a photo which featured a fractured nose. She had reasoned that it happened after she tripped on the stairs.

A friend of hers, Rahul Rai, said that he went with her to the police and reported Aftab for assaulting her after a 2020 violence episode. Rai said that Aftab attacked her two-three times, and there was a deep mark on her neck, which looked like he tried to strangulate her. But police persuaded Shraddha to go home though she was scared, he said, reports NDTV.

Other friends state that Aftab regularly attacked her, and she used to say that she would leave him, but she didn't.

According to police, four days after Aftab and Shraddha moved to Delhi, another quarrel broke out between them over expenses and infidelity. This resulted in the man strangling her to death, chopping her body, storing them in a fridge and dumping them off over the next 18 days in the dark of the night.

The accused has been sent to five more days of police custody by a Delhi court.