The post-mortem report of Nikki Yadav, who was killed allegedly by her live-in partner, has revealed that she died of suffocation even as the Delhi Police is investigating the case on the lines of the sensational Shraddha Walker murder case. According to police, Sahil Yadav, the accused, strangled Nikki to death with a charging cable and stuffed her body into a refrigerator. He then went off to marry another woman on the same day.
There were no injury marks on her body except some marks on her neck. According to doctors, since the body was in the refrigerator, it is difficult to determine the exact time of the death, ANI reported.
Police said they were collecting evidence on the basis of forensic investigation, as they did in the Shraddha murder case. Shraddha was killed by her boyfriend Aftab Poonawala who allegedly cut her body into several pieces and kept them in a refrigerator for almost three weeks before dumping them in a forest area in Delhi.
Though Nikki, 24, was killed on the intervening night of February 9 and 10, the incident came to light only on Tuesday after Sahil was arrested based on a secret input received by the police. On Wednesday, Sahil was presented in a local court which sent him to police custody for five days.
"The accused is on remand for five days. Inquiry is on. Our multiple teams are working to identify the route taken that night. We are also scanning CCTV footages," DCP Crime Branch Satish Kumar said.
The probe team has retrieved footage from a CCTV camera installed at Nikki's house and it shows the victim performing menial tasks, hours before she was killed.
Why Sahil killed Nikki?
Sahil told investigators that in 2018 he was preparing for SSC exams at a coaching centre in Delhi's Uttam Nagar where Nikki stayed in an apartment with her sister. Nikki was also preparing for medical entrance examination at an institute in the same locality. Both of them used to travel to their respective institutes daily in the same bus and became friends and later on fell in love.
Thereafter, the couple started living together in Greater Noida in a rented house and became very close to each other. They also travelled to several places such as Manali, Rishikesh, Haridwar and Dehradoon.
During Covid-induced lockdown, they returned to their homes and after end of the lockdown, they again started living together in a rented house in Dwarka area. The accused did not inform his family members about this relationship with the victim. His family was pressuring him to get married with some other woman and finally in December 2022, his engagement and marriage were fixed with another woman for February 9 and 10, 2023 respectively.
Both Nikki and Sahil had a heated argument after she came to know about it. On the intervening night of February 9 and 10, Sahil strangled her to death using a data cable inside his car. Some reports claimed that the murder was committed near the Kashmiri Gate area and Sahil then drove with the body all the way to his dhaba - a distance of around 36 km. The same day, he went off to marry the woman he was engaged to.
Police said they received a secret input on February 10 that a person named Sahil Gehlot had killed his girlfriend and married another girl on the day of murder. They launched an investigation and arrested the accused from Kair village in Delhi.
Police said though Sahil initially tried to mislead the investigators, he confessed to the crime during the detailed interrogation.
