Gory crimes of passion, each getting worse, benumb Palghar residents

Palghar (Maharashtra): The tribal district of Palghar, bordering Gujarat, has again shot into national headlines for a wrong reason, a gory crime of passion, that has left the locals stunned beyond words.

On Tuesday (June 18), the country was shocked to see video clips of an angry young man Rohit Yadav (29) clobbering his ex-girlfriend Aarti Yadav (22) to death by delivering more than a dozen powerful blows with a heavy iron wrench in the middle of a busy road.

Shockingly, though hundreds of people were around, except for one man, nobody dared to try and stop his savagery or help the bleeding woman, who succumbed to her horrific injuries on the spot.

Instead, passers-by and drivers even halted briefly to click videos and pictures of the horror that unfolded there.

Barely three weeks ago, in late May, Vasai town witnessed another brutal crime when one Najibuddin Sami, 21, allegedly killed a married woman Saira M. Shah, 34, with whom he had an illicit affair.

Sami, nabbed later from New Delhi where he fled after the murder of the woman who happened to be his aunt, told the Palghar Police that Saira was allegedly pressurising him to marry her after divorcing his wife, but he refused to oblige.

In a hot rage over her demands, the accused confessed to stabbing her multiple times with a knife, then taking her body and throwing it off a cliff, near the Mumbai-Ahmedabad National Highway.

The police recovered the body which they could not identify, but a voter inkmark on her finger and a lubricant spray helped the investigators crack the mystery within two days.

After identifying her from the voters’ list, the sleuths managed to reach her husband and they tracked the killer by scanning CCTVs in several pharmacies till they hit upon one from where Sami had purchased the spray.

When they confronted Saira’s husband with the CCTV clip, he identified the person as his nephew.

The man had fled to Delhi, from where a team of Vasai Police nabbed him.

These incidents came even as the people have barely erased the memories of the macabre murder of a local girl, Shraddha Walkar, by her boyfriend Aftab A. Poonawala on May 18, 2022 in New Delhi.

The case would have gone unnoticed but for a complaint lodged by her father that the family and her friends were not able to contact her for nearly three months, after which the police swung into action.

Initially, Poonawala pretended to be as concerned as her family and even tried to help the police investigations, but later he was nailed by the Delhi Police which had found the girl’s body parts and zeroed in on him.

The live-in couple had frequent quarrels over various issues including money and marriage, and on the fateful night of May 18, he strangled Shraddha, then cut her body into 35 small pieces and stored them in a huge deep-freezer.

Later for the next nearly three weeks, at the ungodly hour of 2 A.M., he would carry the body parts in small bags and throw them into the Chhattarpur forests.

Police while scanning CCTV footage of the area subsequently, found him lurking around in the region alone in the night.

The cops recovered around 13 pieces and DNA tests confirmed that they belonged to Shraddha.

Poonawala was arrested on November 12, 2022, and is currently lodged as an undertrial in Tihar Central Jail, New Delhi.

Besides these three soul-shakers, Palghar and adjoining Thane district, have been rocked by other crimes of passion at intervals that remain in public domain for days before another one hogs the headlines.