India’s most gruesome murders and their deadly modus operandi

On June 8, 2023, 56-year-old Manoj Sahani was arrested for murdering his 32-year-old live-in partner, Saraswati Vaidya, at Mumbai’s Mira Road suburb. While the motive for the murder is not yet known, he reportedly lived with the victim’s dead body parts for days.

The act was discovered after neighbours complained of a foul smell from the apartment – the perpetrator is reported to have boiled the victim’s body parts to dispose of them. Sahani has been arrested and is currently under interrogation.

In May 2022, Aftab Poonawala was arrested for the alleged murder of his live-in partner Shraddha Walkar. He too had chopped her into pieces and had planned to dispose of them part by part. To facilitate this, he had bought a 300 litre refrigerator to store the pieces and used to light agarbattis to ward off the smell.

The crime remained undiscovered for weeks until Walkar’s father filed a missing person’s report that led to the discovery of the crime. Poonawala has been arrested, and a court case is ongoing against him.

In May 2008, the murder of 26-year-old Neeraj Grover came to light, days after he was reported missing by his family. The investigation led the police to Grover’s actress friend Maria Susairaj. Her fiance Lieutenant Emil Jerome Mathew confessed to murdering Grover, chopping his body into pieces, transporting and burning his body.

Mathew was found guilty of culpable homicide amounting to murder and destroying evidence – and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Susairaj was given a three-year prison sentence for destroying evidence.

The infamous murders came to light in 2006 after the parents of Nithari village – which had an unusually high number of cases of missing young girls — went searching for their children. One of them claimed to have found a decomposed hand, and later skeletal remains of many came to light near the municipal tank behind the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher.

Later, Pandher and his domestic help Surinder Koli confessed to the murders. The former was convicted in two of the five cases against him and Koli was convicted in 10 out of the 16 cases against him. Both of them were awarded death sentences by the courts — as the case was described as the ‘rarest of the rare’. The ages of victims ranged between 5-20 years.

The macabre murder of 29-year-old Naina Sahni, a Congress party worker, came to light in the mid-90s. Sushil Sharma was accused of shooting Sahni dead after suspecting her of an extramarital affair. Sharma later tried to get rid of her body in a tandoor of a barbecue restaurant, with the help of its manager, Keshav Kumar.

After her half-burnt body was discovered, Kumar was arrested but Sharma was caught only after a massive manhunt. Sharma was sentenced to death in 2003, while Kumar was given a seven-year prison term. A three-judge bench commuted Sharma’s death sentence to a life term, and was released in 2018.