Shraddha Walker murder: CCTV footage captures the accused with two bags, suspected to be carrying remains

A CCTV footage from October has emerged in the horrifying Shraddha Walker murder case that purportedly shows the accused carrying a bag on street to apparently dispose of the victim’s body parts.

Twenty-seven-year-old Walker was strangled by her partner, Aftab Poonawala in May. Police arrested the accused last week.

Poonawala has confessed to the crime and told police that he cut Walker’s body into more than 30 pieces and disposed of the remains over a period of several months.

The CCTV surveillance footage shows that the accused made at least three trips to a nearby forest, dumping grounds and burial places where he scattered the remains.

The video shows Poonawala carrying a bag on his back at around 4 am on 18 October and carrying another one in his hand.

The officials said that they suspect that some parts of Walker’s body were in that bag. Police, however, say that they are verifying the authenticity of the video.

Meanwhile, the Delhi police continued with their search of the Mehrauli forest on Saturday, near the apartment where Walker and Poonawala lived together, in a bid to recover any evidence.

Senior police officials said that “the accused had disposed of the head, torso and hands on 18 October.”

“All the clothes from the house have been seized. Most of the clothes belong to Aaftab,” police sources were quoted as saying in the local media. The seized items shall be sent for forensic examination.

The gory details of the murder have sparked a conversation in India about domestic abuse and the safety of women.

One union minister from the ruling, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, Kaushal Kishore was thrashed online for his unsavoury comments when he said that “educated” girls are responsible for leaving parents for live-in relationships.

He said: “There has to be a proper registration to stay in a live-in relationship. If parents are not happy with the choice of partner, then the girls should first go to court and get married and then stay together.”

Chief justice of the Bombay High Court, Dipankar Datta on Saturday also mentioned the Walker case and said that the case represents the flipside of the access to internet.

He said: “All these crimes are being committed because there is so much access to the material on the internet.”

He continued: “New instruments are being invented in the new age. In 1989, we did not have any mobile phones. Two or three years later, we came to possess pagers. Then we had those big Motorola mobile handsets and now they have condensed into small phones that are equipped with everything that one can imagine. However, they could also be hacked by anybody, making it an attack on our privacy.”

Poonawala and Walker had met on a dating site, Bumble, and moved in together. Poonawala has told police that he was inspired by the award-winning drama crime series “Dexter”.

He allegedly said that he kept Walker’s body parts in small black polythene bags inspired by the show’s main character, vigilante serial killer Dexter Morgan, played by Michael C Hall.