Southwest Delhi murder: CCTV footage of victim's last hours at home retrieved

Police on Wednesday retrieved footage from a CCTV camera installed at Nikki Yadav's Uttam Nagar house and it shows the 23-year-old performing menial tasks, hours before she was killed allegedly by her boyfriend.

The footage are from February 9, the day of her boyfriend Sahil Gehlot's engagement. Yadav allegedly called to meet Gehlot and express her displeasure at his decision to get married.

The first footage, which bears a timestamp of 1.10 pm, shows Yadav taking clothes upstairs to her rented home. The second footage, timestamped at 9.27 pm, shows her peeping out of a door of her rented house before leaving the premises. She is seen returning within a minute.

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A senior police officer said, "We are looking into the CCTV footage and also scanning for more to collect evidence and ascertain the sequence of events that unfolded on the day of the murder."

Yadav was allegedly strangled to death by her 24-year-old boyfriend who stuffed her body inside a refrigerator of his dhaba (eatery) in southwest Delhi and went off to marry another woman the same day, police said on Tuesday.

Accused Gehlot, a resident of Mitraon village in southwest Delhi, has been arrested.

The incident came to light Valentine's Day and it was on the instance of the accused that four days after the murder that Yadav's body was recovered on Tuesday morning from the refrigerator at the eatery, which was locked since the day of the murder.

The police said the accused had hidden from his girlfriend the fact that his marriage was fixed with another woman. When Yadav came to know about the wedding, she had a heated argument with Gehlot which led to her murder.

"It has been claimed that she was threatening to implicate the man in a case if he married another woman," a source said.

The couple had been in a relationship for the past few years and Yadav wanted to marry the accused, the police said.

The alleged murder took place on the intervening night of February 9 and 10 when the victim confronted the accused about his marriage, a senior police officer said, adding that he killed her using the data cable of his mobile phone in his car and then kept the body in the refrigerator.

Narrating the sequence of events, the officer said Yadav was unhappy with the fact that Gehlot was getting married. On February 9 -- the day the accused got engaged -- she called him up and told him to come to her flat in Uttam Nagar.

"The accused went to the victim's place in his car and picked her up from there. She kept pressuring him to not get married.

"She had already planned to go with him to Goa and had booked tickets for February 9. She asked him to accompany her to Goa but he refused. This led to an argument and in anger, he killed her inside his car," the officer said.

The accused then took the body to the dhaba, which had not been operational for a long time. After stuffing the body inside the fridge, he locked the eatery, the officer added.

The body was found intact inside the refrigerator and started decomposing at a slow pace, the police said, adding only strangulation marks were found on her body.

Police suspect that the accused committed the crime near Kashmere Gate but the location of the murder is yet to be verified.

Special Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravindra Singh Yadav said that on February 10, a secret input was received that a person named Sahil Gehlot killed his girlfriend and married another girl on the same day.

Upon checking, no case or complaint about any such woman missing was found to be reported, Yadav said.