In a murder case that took over two months to unravel, police on Wednesday arrested a man named Umesh Sharma from Modinagar in UP's Ghaziabad district for allegedly killing his tenant, Ankit Khokar, and chopping his body into pieces that he threw in a canal.
The victim had recently sold his ancestral land in Baghpat from which he had got Rs 1 crore, which the killer was eyeing, police said. A friend of the killer, identified as Parvesh, has also been arrested.
Ankit Khokar lived alone ever since his parents died some years ago, and was a PhD scholar enrolled with a university in Lucknow.
Police got involved only after his friends tried searching for him as they sensed something wrong when he did not answer calls for weeks. When they started receiving some messages from his number, they found that the conversation style wasn't his, and that calls were still not being answered.
The now-arrested landlord — to whom Ankit Khokar had given Rs 40 lakh as loan, and whose wife he called 'sister' — told them he, too, did not know where he had gone.
Police say they have now found out that he had strangled Ankit Khokar to death on October 6; then chopped up the body into at least three parts using a saw, and packed them up in aluminum foil. He dumped one part in a canal at Khatauli in Muzaffarnagar, another in the Mussoorie canal, and a part on an expressway, it is alleged. The parts remain to be found.
"He withdrew Rs 20 lakh from the victim's accounts in batches using his ATM card. For more, he gave the card to his friend Pravesh and told him to make withdrawals in Uttarakhand. He also told him to take the victim's mobile phone with him to mislead investigations if and when he's reported missing," said Iraj Raja, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Ghaziabad Rural.
