Lucknow: A woman, along with her lover, allegedly conspired to kill her 30-year-old husband and portrayed the murder as highway robbery, police said, adding that both the accused were arrested on Friday. Victim Arun Prajapati, a native of Baraut area in Baghpat district, was shot dead in Meerut’s Saroorpur area on Thursday evening.
Prajapati was married to Archana (25), a resident of Sarghana in Meerut, around six months ago. On Thursday morning, Prajapati took leave from work and had come to Meerut to “see a doctor for his ailing wife”.
He first went to his in-laws’ place in Meerut and stayed there till the evening. The couple left the place around 6pm. An hour later, the family was informed about the incident that happened near Meerut-Karnal highway.
Archana initially told the cops that two unidentified bike-borne men stopped their motorcycle and tried to snatch her jewellery and purse. When her husband — who worked as a manager for online shopping platform Meesho in Delhi — resisted, the miscreants shot him in the head, the woman told the cops.
Arun’s father Satveer Prajapti, 60, however, had doubts on Archana’s claims. He told police to investigate the matter and look into Archana’s call detail records.
SP (Rural) Meerut, Kamlesh Bahadur, said on Friday, “Police gathered her call detail records and found an unknown number with whom she had spoken twice on the day of the incident — one of the calls was made just before leaving her house on Thursday evening. During questioning, she broke down and confessed that she and her lover, Saurabh Thakur, had hatched a plot to kill Prajapati.”
Bahadur said, “The woman and her lover had hired two contract killers and tried to make it look like a case of highway robbery-cum-murder. Both of them were arrested and booked under IPC section 302 (murder). Two other accused are at large.”
A senior police officer said, “Investigation revealed that Archana and Saurabh had been seeing each other for almost five years. Their families were against their relationship. Prajapati, who was the youngest among three siblings, lived in Delhi, while Archana stayed with her in-laws in the village.”
Police handed over Arun’s body to his family for the last rites after postmortem on Friday.
