66-year-old woman living alone murdered; teen help, beau held

NEW DELHI: A 66-year-old woman was strangled to death and her house ransacked in west Delhi's Uttam Nagar on Wednesday. She lived alone in the house, her husband having died in 2018. Suspecting the 17-year-old domestic worker and her purported boyfriend of being the perpetrators of the crime, police pursued the man and the girl, whose age is being verified, and caught them in Gorakhpur in UP. The cops claimed to have recovered the jewellery items stolen from the house from the duo.
Police received the call about the murder on Thursday afternoon. The victim was identified as Usha Kaul, 66. The cops suspected the role of the live-in domestic help who was found missing from the house. Kaul had employed the teenager a year ago. The victim's son, on whose complaint an FIR was later registered, works with an IT firm in Noida, while her daughter is married.
M Harsha Vardhan, DCP (Dwarka) said, "A police team checked the footage from CCTV cameras and saw a man entering the house around 2.40am. Later at 4.18am, a man and woman were seen emerging from the house, one of whom was identified as the domestic worker engaged by the victim. The incident was only reported around 2.30pm when some neighbours and relatives alerted the victim's son."
Vardhan said Kaul had not done the police verification of the girl, so no details were available, including a mobile number. The DCP, however, said that the domestic help was identified through technical analysis and human intelligence inputs. "We also learnt that she was staying with a boy called Shivam for the last few weeks in the vicinity," revealed Vardhan. "Based on further technical analysis and CCTV footage, we found that after the murder and robbery, the pair had caught a train to flee to their hometown in Samastipur, Bihar."
However, the investigators did not have any details about the train compartment in which the two were travelling. Police officers said the Government Railway Police unit of UP Police was contacted and the photo of the woman and the man shared with them. After strenuous effort, the fugitives were spotted in one of the train compartments. In a late-night operation, both the accused individuals were detained at Gorakhpur railway station.
On checking their belongings, the cops claimed to have found the mobile phone of the murdered woman, the jewellery they had stolen and other items like clothes and bags that were taken from Kaul's house.
On being interrogated, the girl apparently said that she used to look after the senior citizen and even stayed in her home at night. Seeing the lady living alone, she was tempted to rob her and roped in Shivam, with whom she had eloped from Bihar.
"Both the accused individuals are yet to be thoroughly interrogated because the Dwarka police team is returning from Gorakhpur with them. Once they are in Delhi, we will get more details of how they planned the murder and robbery," said DCP Vardhan.