According to the police, the victim had recently sold off his ancestral property in Baghpat for around Rs 1 crore, which his landlord, the murderer, was allegedly eyeing.
In yet another murder case that ended up chopped body parts disposed off at different locations, police on Wednesday arrested a man named Umesh Sharma from Modinagar in Uttar Pradesh's Ghaziabad district, for allegedly killing his tenant Ankit Khokar and cutting his body into three pieces that he threw in a canal.
As per a report on NDTV, the case unravelled over two months after Khokar's friends reported him as missing. His friends started searching for him after Khokar did not answer calls for weeks. After some time, they received some messages, but found that the conversation style was not the same which led them to file a complaint with the police.
The killer initially told the police that he was not aware of the victim's whereabouts. Ankit had recently loaned Rs 40 lakh to Umesh and referred to his wife as 'sister.'
Khokar had recently sold off his ancestral property in Baghpat for around Rs 1 crore, which the landlord was allegedly eyeing. A friend of Umesh, Parvesh, has also been arrested for misleading the search.
Police said that Umesh strangled his tenant to death on October 6, then cut his body into at least three pieces using a saw and wrapped the parts in aluminium foil. He then went around disposing off the bits of the corpse in a canal at Khatauli in Muzaffarnagar, another in the Mussoorie canal, and a part on an expressway. The dumped body parts are yet to be found.
"He withdrew ₹ 20 lakh from the victim's accounts in batches using his ATM card. For more, he gave the card to his friend Pravesh and told him to make withdrawals in Uttarakhand. He also told him to take the victim's mobile phone with him to mislead investigations if and when he's reported missing," NDTV quoted Iraj Raja, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Ghaziabad Rural, as saying.
Ankit Khokar lived alone ever since his parents died some years ago, and was a PhD scholar enrolled with a university in Lucknow.