Hapur Police on Sunday arrested the owners of a placement agency over the alleged rape and murder of a Jharkhand woman. Police said that Ankit Kumar and his wife, both in their mid-30s, ran Srishti Enterprises and had sent the victim to work as a domestic help at a Delhi residence.
According to police, Ankit had developed an obsession with the woman and called her back to Hapur and raped her repeatedly.
“Ankit, who had developed an obsession with her, called the woman back to Hapur and confined her at his residence, where he raped her repeatedly,” additional superintendent of police (ASP) Vineet Bhatnagar said. The officer said that when she threatened to approach the police, Ankit and his wife beat her to death.
The incident happened on August 28, and the couple dumped the body in a sugarcane field along the Delhi-Lucknow National Highway-9 near the Pilakhua area a day later. The badly decomposed body, found stuffed inside a suitcase, was discovered only recently, on December 1.
An investigation led the police to Ankit and his wife. An eyewitness who was present inside the house at the time of the crime played a crucial role in helping crack the case.
As per the police, the woman witnessed the murder but was threatened by the accused to stay silent. “Out of fear, she remained silent and later disclosed the incident to her employer nearly two months later,” said Pilakhua SHO Shyopal Singh.
Singh said that the woman’s employer, a resident of Vivek Vihar in Delhi, approached Delhi police with a written complaint, but no immediate action was taken.
“As the body recovered from the suitcase was beyond recognition, we followed a pattern observed in similar cases – murders committed in adjoining districts and bodies dumped along the highway,” he said. “We scanned missing persons’ records and pasted posters across Delhi, Ghaziabad, Meerut and nearby areas. A man from Delhi – the employer of another woman who witnessed the crime – contacted us after seeing the poster, which helped crack the case.”