Uttar Pradesh: Year on, cops solve case of headless, armless body

MEERUT: When UP police found 19-year-old Ekta Jaswal’s body in a field last June, the arms — one with a tattoo of her name and another with that of the man she loved — had been severed to conceal her identity. She had also been decapitated, her clothes removed, to leave no clues about the BCom graduate from Ludhiana. But after a year-long chase, an investigation that spanned various states and six arrests, police have cracked the murder mystery that shook two towns — one in Punjab, the other in UP. At the heart of it lay a tale of love and deception and the sinister rage of a man who first called himself Aman but turned out to be Saqib.
On Tuesday, as Mohammad Saqib was being escorted to the lock-up by police after being arrested, the cold-blooded lover made a last-ditch attempt to flee but was shot in the leg and caught. “He had calculated every move, leaving no clues until we stumbled upon an interesting lead during our investigation,” said Meerut SSP Ajay Sahani.

On June 13 last year, the girl’s dismembered body was dug up from a field near Lohia village in Daurala region after a farmer spotted a dog carrying something that resembled a human arm. “There was no way to identify the victim. So we decided to trace mobile numbers in the area that were functional to look for clues,” said the SSP. The cops found something odd — one of the cell numbers was registered in Ludhiana instead of UP.
A team was sent to Ludhiana to go through the missing persons reports there. There was one that caught their eye — the daughter of a family that ran a thriving taxi business had disappeared in May, and family jewellery worth Rs 25 lakh had been stolen. Cops met the family which informed them that they suspected their daughter had eloped with her lover. But that she was still alive; she was constantly uploading her photos on social media. Except that it wasn't her.
“Saqib was using her phone to do that,” said Sahani. The last photo he updated using Ekta’s account was just a week ago.
It had been an unlikely match from the start — Ekta, a well-educated, independent woman who aspired to get a government job, and Saqib, a school dropout who worked as an assistant at a shop that sold talismans in Ludhiana. Ekta, then working as an event manager, met Saqib at the shop. He introduced himself as Aman. It was early 2019 and their love blossomed.
“Saqib then took her to his home in Meerut where the girl realised for the first time that he belonged to a different faith. They had a fight following which Saqib spiked her drink and murdered her. Five of his kin, including his father, brother and sister-in-law, have also been arrested,” Sahani said.