‘RAW officer was reading news of identical crime’

NEW DELHI: If Research & Analysis Wing officer Ananya Chakraborty borrowed the method of killing the three members of his family from crime novels, the idea to end the five-year standoff with his family with murder may have come from a news report published last week, police sources said on Tuesday.
Exactly a week before this murder, late on Sunday night, businessman Ravinder Kanojia (35) bludgeoned his wife and two daughters to death using a three-foot long water pipe and then hanged himself at his home in Dwarka, southwest Delhi.While daughters Nandini (8) and Yashika (6) were found in one room with head injuries, Kanojia’s wife Chanda (30) was in another. Kanojia himself was found hanging in the drawing room of the house.
The page of an English newspaper carrying this story was found on the bed of the “depressed” Ananya, police have said. “The newspaper was folded from the middle in a way that suggested someone had kept it aside after reading the news report spread across half of the page. The news report was of the Kanojia family murders,” the source said. They had got the paper photographed on location by forensic teams and are going to include it in their report to the court, he said. Police have sealed scores of crime novels recovered from a room in the flat.
They are yet to ascertain the immediate trigger of the killings. They suspect it was the fallout of a quarrel which broke out that night. Nobody seems to have had dinner that night as the dal was intact in the serving bowl. “The newspaper report might have inspired him to put an end to his “problems” through murder and the novels may have pointed him to the perfect way to do so,” the source said.
Police have recorded the statements of the family members and a friend whom Ananya sent a text message saying “god bless you” at 11am on Friday. They had initially mistaken the time as 11pm. Police on Tuesday also received the post mortem report which has confirmed that the injuries were caused by bladed as well as heavy weapons. The daughter had the fewest injuries and the wife the most. Police said they would file an abetted chargesheet in the case as Chakraborty is dead.