 "Merchant Navy officer from UP's Meerut was murdered by his wife and her lover. Image Courtesy: X")
In a shocking incident, a woman from Uttar Pradesh, along with her lover, allegedly stabbed her Merchant Navy Officer husband to death.
The duo then chopped his body into 15 pieces and sealed the remains in a drum filled with cement, according to the police.
The incident came to light when the police received information about the foul smell emanating from his residence in Meerut.
The woman, identified as Muskan Rastogi, and her lover, Sahil Shukla, were arrested after the body was recovered about 15 days after the crime took place.
The case is a chilling reminder of one of the most gruesome murders: the 2008 killing of Neeraj Grover in Mumbai.
The horrific murder
The body of Saurabh Rajput, a 29-year-old Merchant Navy employee, was found on Tuesday in his rented apartment in Brahmpuri’s Indiranagar Phase 2.
According to NDTV, Rajput had returned from London on February 24 to celebrate his daughter’s sixth birthday on February 28 and had been missing since March 4.
Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Ayush Vikram Singh said, “Police received a tip-off about a foul smell emanating from the victim’s house. Upon investigation, we found his body chopped into multiple pieces and sealed inside a water drum filled with cement, presumable to hasten decomposition.”
The body has been sent for post-mortem and a case has been registered based on a complaint from Rajput’s family.
The victim’s wife and accused, Muskan Rastogi, and her lover Sahil Shukla, have been taken into custody and booked for murder and destruction of evidence. They will be produced before the court on Wednesday.
Also read: Pressure of marriage, fights… What brew between Mahalakshmi, lover before Bengaluru murder?
A trip to Manali
As per the accused’s statement, Rastogi mixed sleeping pills in her husband’s food on March 4. Once he was asleep, she and her lover, Shukla, murdered him with a knife, chopped his body and put pieces in a drum to seal it with wet cement.
According to the victim’s family, Rastogi misled them by pretending he was alive.
Rastogi reportedly had the victim’s cellphone and was sending messages to his family to avoid suspicion while ignoring their repeated requests to speak to him.
After committing the crime, Rastogi and Shukla even travelled to Manali with the victim’s phone and started uploading photographs through his social media handles to avoid suspicions.
But when Rajput did not take calls from his family members for several days, they filed a police complaint.
A short-lived happiness
Police said that Rastogi, who hailed from Gauripura, and Rajput had tied the knot in 2016 despite their families’ disapproval.
After a few years of marriage, Rajput quit his Merchant Navy job to spend more time with his wife. However, the decision didn’t sit well with his family. The couple soon moved out and rented a house in Indiranagar. They welcomed a daughter in 2019, according to NDTV.
However, the happiness was short-lived.
Rajput soon learnt about Rastogi’s affair with Sahil Shukla. The tensions between the couple even prompted them to consider divorce. Eventually, Rajput stepped back, thinking of his daughter’s future.
He re-joined Navy and left the country for work in 2023, the report claimed.
A case similar to Neeraj Grover’s murder
The recent case is a stark reminder of the murder of television executive Neeraj Grover, who was killed by Kannada actor Maria Susairaj and her fiancé, Lieutenant Emile Jerome Mathew, who was a naval officer.
The killing had made headlines largely because the victim’s body was chopped into about 300 pieces.
Mathew, who had arrived from Kochi, fatally stabbed Grover after he found the television executive in the flat of Susairaj. The couple reportedly tried to hide the murder by allegedly cutting Grover’s body into pieces, stuffing them in duffle bags that Susairaj had bought from a nearby mall and burnt them using petrol.
In her defence, the Kannada actor claimed she felt threatened by Mathew and destroyed evidence under pressure.
Initially, Susairaj tried to mislead the police by saying the victim had left her residence to attend a party. However, his friends had already approached the police saying Grover’s phone was not reachable since May 6.
She also claimed that Grover left his phone at her house, but the police grew suspicious when they found a text message on his phone on May 7.
Soon, forensic examination confirmed that the blood on the knives was Grover’s and witnesses, including the society’s watchman and a petrol pump attendee, testified the couple’s movements after Grover’s death.
Mathew was soon arrested after Susairaj confessed to the crime.
In 2011, a Mumbai court charged Mathew with culpable homicide not amounting to murder and destruction of evidence under Section 300 and 204 of the IPC, and sentenced him to 10 years of imprisonment, while Susairaj was charged with destruction of evidence and given a three-year jail term. The court also noted that the murder wasn’t pre-meditated, and happened at the spur of the moment.
Susairaj was released from the jail on July 2, 2011.
With inputs from agencies