Unidentified assailants murdered a 70-year-old woman by slashing her wrists and throat at her house at Sikri Kalan in Modinagar town of Ghaziabad on Tuesday night. The police, prima facie, have denied a robbery motive and suspect the crime to be work of some someone known to her.

According to family of the victim, Savitri Devi, she lived alone in the house after her husband’s death in 1980. Her son Tejpal Singh, who stays in the same locality, said he did not know of anyone having a personal rivalry with his mother.

“Around 11am on Wednesday, her neighbours gave me a call and asked me to come soon. When I arrived, I found my mother lying upside down with her hands and legs tied to the charpoi with the her saree. Her wrists and throat were slashed and there was blood all around,” Singh said.

“The household items were ransacked. Her earrings were missing but a small gold pendant and anklets were present. It seems like someone known to her was behind the incident. We visited her on a daily basis. The last time I met her was on Monday when she had come to see a house which was constructed by my brother-in-law in the same locality. We have no rivalry with anyone,” Singh said.

He said he lives barely 500 metres from his mother’s house with his wife, a daughter who is to get married on May 7, and his sons — one a class 8 student and another a polytechnic student.

The police have roped in a forensics team and a dog squad to crack the case. On Singh’s complaint, a case was against unidentified assailants under the IPC Section 302 (murder) at Modinagar police station.

“We are probing all angles, including that of a property dispute. We have ruled out a robbery motive for now as her assailant(s) left behind her anklets and pendant. Someone ransacked her house to make it look like a robbery,” Upendra Kumar Agrawal, deputy inspector general, said.

“It seems that the person was known to her and spent a lot of time in the house. (S)he ransacked the house, tied her up and slashed her neck and wrists. We have deployed a team to crack the case at the earliest,” he said.

First Published: Apr 18, 2019 14:05 IST