Delhi techie arrested for killing wife, chopping body into 7 pieces and dumping it in cardboard boxes

In an incident that is a heartbreaking reminder of a 2010 case, a Delhi engineer was arrested on Tuesday, June 26, for allegedly strangulating his wife to death and then chopping her body into seven pieces. The techie has been identified as Sajid Ali Ansari and the police have also arrested his brothers Ishteyaque Alam Ansari and Hasmat Ali Ansari, who are said to have helped him in the murder.

Sajid and his wife Juhi reportedly often argued over his unemployment, but things took a gory turn when the techie strangulated the woman during one of these fights and dismembered her body with the help of his brothers.

The couple had fallen in love when they were studying in Kurukshetra and had tied the knot against Juhi's parents' wishes, reported the Times of India. They also have children, who were asleep in the other room when the murder took place.

The incident came to light when the locals of South East Delhi's Sarita Vihar spotted the body at a vacant plot on June 21. They then informed the police, who found a dismembered body of a woman in a carton. The torso and a leg were reportedly found in the carton whereas the other five parts were stuffed into sacks and plastic bags.

The police had a tough time trying to identify the body as the face had been disfigured. "It was a challenge for the investigating teams to identify the woman and trace her killers as there were no identification marks on the body. All evidences, including the carton, the victim's clothes and bags collected from the spot, were minutely studied to get the location of the killers," TOI quoted Special commissioner (law and order, south) R P Upadhyay as saying.

The police then made several efforts to identify the body and even went to shops from where the woman might have bought clothes, but to no avail. They then scanned about 90 calls, in which couples complained of marital disputes but there weren't of any help either.

The Breakthrough

The breakthrough came when they scanned the carton and found the tag with the address of a courier company based in Gurgaon.

"We found that the carton was sent from UAE to one Javed Akhtar in Aligarh. A team was sent to Aligarh to track Akhtar. The man told cops that he had brought some goods from UAE and left one of the cartons at his apartment in Jamia Nagar's Shaheen Bagh. He had rented the flat to Ansari," DCP (southeast) Chinmoy Biswal explained.

The police team then visited the flat but found that Sajid had vacated the flat and given the keys to his neighbour. The police then found the woman's blood-stained clothes in the house, after which a hunt for the man was launched. He was traced to his brother's flat and taken into custody.

During the interrogation, Sajid revealed that he had picked the fight with Juhi on purpose and then killed her. A case of murder has been registered against Sajid, and Hasmat and Ishteyaque have been booked for destroying evidence.

The 2010 case

Juhi's murder reminds one of the 2010 case when Delhi software engineer Rajesh Gulati had killed his wife Anupama and chopped her body into 72 pieces. He had then kept some of the body parts in the freezer, while packed the other parts in a polythene bag and dumped them into a drain on Mussoorie road.

A court in Uttarakhand's capital Dehradun sentenced Gulati to life in prison in 2017.