After a missing Uzbek woman was found murdered in Haryana's Sonipat earlier this week, harrowing details of how the crime took place have emerged from the interrogation of Gurvinder alias Gagan who is being accused of the killing.
What has baffled the police even more is the transformation of Gurvinder from a taxi driver to a sex racketeer who allegedly murdered not only the 28-year-old woman Shakhnoza Shukurova but also another Uzbekistani woman who had helped the accused to kill the victim.
Gurvinder told investigators of Delhi Police that he along with Atazhanova Shaknoza Kupalbayevna or Naaz, strangulated Shukurova, also known as Shahnaz, after she kept on demanding Rs 8 lakh that he owed her. According to an investigator, the accused called Shahnaz to meet him and strangulated her in the Indica car driven at that time by Gurvinder.
After the alleged murder on September 24, the two drove around Delhi for two hours before dumping the body in Haryaná's Sonipat area. Shahnaz's body was stuffed into a bag following which Gurvinder allegedly set the bag on fire and threw it in a dense patch of forest in Sonipat.
"The duo had driven around for about two hours with the body. They decided to proceed to Haryana via Karnal road but had not thought about how exactly the body would be disposed of," said a police official quoting Gurvinder.
According to the official, the duo came to the conclusion that burning the body would be a better option than burying it.
"They spotted a petrol pump on the highway and parked the vehicle at a distance of half-a-kilometre from it. Gurvinder then allegedly went to the petrol pump and told the workers present there that the petrol in his car had finished and he needed some of it so he could go home. Gurvinder told us that he used the same petrol to burn the body," the official further added.
Gurvinder apparently didn't even look back after setting the body on fire and left with Naaz.
A missing report was filed by a driver of a private taxi who reported Shahnaz had been missing. Shahnaz who worked in Delhi as a belly dancer, is survived by her mother and two sisters who flew in from Uzbekistan on October 2 and have been been in constant touch with Delhi Police since then. Yet Gurvinder managed to mislead the investigators. When he finally confessed to the crime, not only did he spill the beans on the gruesome murder but he also claimed that he had killed Naaz as well and dumped her body in Hapur area of Haryana.
Sources told dna that police had checked the area identified by Gurvinder only to find nothing. Delhi police officials now believe that Gurvinder is still trying to mislead the investigators. Official sources even told dna that the second Uzbekistani girl, Naaz might not be involved in the murder at all.
"There is a chance that the accused along with some other of his associates might have killed the two girls as they owed them money. He is trying to shield the other accused," said a police source. "There might be more people involved in the human trafficking racket as it came to the fore that Naaz had also sent a letter to Uzbek embassy that she was being forced into prostitution," the source further said, adding that there were three other suspects whom police are trying to nab. "One from Goa, another from Bangalore and third one seems to be an Afghan national," the source said.
