A meeting at a Pune cafe hours before 26-year-old Ketan Agarwal was pushed to death at Lohagad Fort near Pune has emerged as a key piece of evidence in the case, with police saying his fiancee, Siya Goyal, 20, and her lover, Chetan Babulal Chaudhary, 22, finalised the plan to kill him there before staging it as a trekking accident.
Ketan, who got engaged to Siya in February and was due to marry her in Jaipur in November, was allegedly pushed into a gorge on June 18. Siya initially told his family he had slipped during the trek.
Earlier attempts
Police said Siya had repeatedly pushed for visits to the fort. During an outing on June 14, she allegedly tried to push Ketan off a cliff, but he managed to grab onto a bush. When he questioned her, she raised a false alarm about a snake to cover her actions.
On the morning of June 18, Siya and Chetan met at a Pune cafe and identified spots on the fort from which to push Ketan, NDTV reported. That afternoon, Chetan followed the couple on the trek wearing a hoodie and headset, communicating with Siya through hand gestures, before the two allegedly pushed Ketan from behind.
The mistake that gave him away
Investigators reviewing CCTV footage noticed Chetan's hooded figure trailing the couple and found it suspicious that he wore a hoodie despite temperatures of 33 degrees Celsius that day.
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A police officer told news agency PTI that technical analysis pointed to "a well-thought-out conspiracy," and that comparing Chetan's social media photographs with the CCTV visuals helped identify him. Teams from Lonavala Rural Police Station and the Local Crime Branch then traced and detained him.
2,004 calls in seven months
Investigators found Siya and Chetan, who met at a Diwali party last year, had exchanged 2,004 phone calls totalling nearly 238 hours over seven months.
Police said Siya did not wish to marry Ketan, a director at his family's real estate business, and the duo allegedly decided to kill him before a planned pre-wedding photoshoot in Bali, a trip that was later called off after Ketan's passport went missing.
Police said Chetan told interrogators Siya opposed eloping, fearing it would bring disrespect to her family. Both have been arrested.
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