A series of WhatsApp and Instagram chats of Shraddha Walker with friends and colleagues for more than two years have revealed a sordid saga of abuse, betrayal and a long history of unhappy partnership.
The chats and conversations reveal that Shraddha used to be beaten by his partner and killer Aaftab Poonawala quite frequently. In such a chat Shraddha candidly shared with one of her friends that she could not get off the bed and had to later be hospitalised.
In another chat, Shraddha wrote to her work manager, “I won’t be able to make it today because from all the beating yesterday my BP is low and my body hurts. I don’t have the energy to get off the bed.” She also attached a photo of her face with injury marks.
She told the manager she needed to «make sure he (Aftab) moves out today» and referred to having spoken to his parents too, in the chat from November 24, 2020, which suggests that they’d probably broken up in between.
The chats are now with Delhi Police and corroborated by her hospital admission around the same time.
The manager asked for her “husband›s name”, which suggests she’d told her office that they were married. “Don’t worry. We are all with you,” the friend responded, telling her he could ask his mother and sister to help her too.
In an Instagram chat with a friend, when Shraddha shared a photo to show off a new hairstyle, the friend noticed injuries. Shraddha said her nose got fractured because she “tripped while climbing the stairs”.
Around a week after this, she was in a private hospital in Vasai between December 3 and 6, records show. The doctor there said Shraddha had “only internal injuries” at the time. The hospital report listed “severe back pain, nausea, neck pain, difficulty in movement of neck, and tingling and numbness in lower limb”. She did not go there for a follow-up. Speaking to news agency, Rahul Rai, who identified himself as a friend of Shraddha’s, said, “In 2020, we (him and other friends) helped her file an FIR after she reached out to us for help saying Aaftab beat her.
We took her home.” “The police officer suggested detaining Aaftab for interrogation but she said such things happen in a relationship,” he added.
Rahul claimed the day after she filed the complaint, the police called her over to the police station. She said she was scared that he (Aaftab) would kill her as he has already tried to kill her before and had beaten her multiple times, her friend recalled.
“Aftab would lock her up at home and talk to other girls,” Rahul claimed, adding that Shraddha had also talked to him about her partner’s drug abuse.
“When we tried to reach out to her again, she said, ‘don’t worry, such things happen’. We did not have any sort of contact ever since,” Rahul said, adding that he never imagined that her live-in relatinship with Aftab would meet such a horrific fallout.
Rahul’s statemenb came on a day a team from Delhi Police reached Mumbai as part of their probe into the Shraddha murder case.