Vasant Vihar triple murder: How focus on nurse made probe go off course

NEW DELHI: The triple murder case of an elderly couple and their medical attendant that took place in Vasant Vihar on Saturday night could have been cracked sooner had police not been fixated upon the theory of the killers being associated with the nurse, Khushbu.
For more than 48 hours, the local police continued to grill two of Khushbu’s acquaintances and didn’t probe that someone known to the elderly couple, Vishnu Mathur (79) and Shashi (75), could have committed the crime.
The cops had their own reasons for not doing so — expensive watches and cash were found intact in the house. They also believed that the robbers wouldn’t have taken away the phones for fear of being tracked. However, these theories took the probe in the wrong direction.
Moreover, cops also factored in the medical findings which showed that Khushbu was stabbed 16 times while the elderly couple was stabbed just twice. This had occurred as Khushbu had resisted the assault and the couple had been asleep. Police mistook the motive as vengeance.
Due to the missing mobile phones, police relied on the call logs and IP addresses connected with the numbers. They zeroed in on a male friend of the medical attendant and a neighbour based on these logs. They made the friend their prime suspect after noticing that his mobile phone was switched off on Saturday night.
The investigators were also deceived by the CCTV footage of the housing society which showed a man and a woman walking out. This matched the prime suspect’s profile as he was living with a woman. All this while, the real killers — Preeti Sehrawat and Manoj Bhatt — watched the news to keep a track of the investigation. Police are probing how the elderly couple was not registered with the senior citizen cell. Senior officers are likely to take action on this lapse.