New Delhi: Rakesh Khanna, a 60-year-old man, believed that the money he had got from a real estate deal would secure his twilight years. It instead snuffed out his life. A relative got wind of it and hatched a plot to rob him.
When questioned about her movements on Aug 30, she gave conflicting answers, prompting the police to analyse her mobile call records and WhatsApp details. The police have also recovered Rs 70,000 of the stolen money and gold jewellery. Simran was found to be loitering near the house after the murder, trying to monitor the police response. A case was registered at South Rohini police station, and the accused produced in court and taken on remand.
Khanna, a resident of Rohini Sector 3, had recently sold a flat for Rs 80 lakh and converted the cash into gold. Armed with intimate knowledge of the family’s routine, Simran, a 23-year-old primary school teacher, allegedly hatched the plot to rob Khanna with her gym-owner boyfriend, Himanshu, trainer Chirag , 22, and Paras,19, a Class XII student previously involved in a case in Mukherjee Nagar. Most of the gold remained safely concealed in the house with even Khanna’s family unsure where he had hidden it.
Special CP (law and order) Devesh Chandra Shrivastava formed a 12-member team, led by joint commissioner Vijay Singh and DCP Shashank Jaiswal, to investigate the case. When cops and a forensic team got down to their job, the plot began to unravel quickly. The police stumbled upon breadcrumbs left behind by the suspects, and their mobile phone locations also gave them away.
Studying CCTV footage from the area, the cops also noticed some suspicious movement a few days before the murder.