'I was humiliated, slapped for not paying rent': Tenant strangles landlady in Delhi; arrested

NEW DELHI: Over two months after a 65-year-old woman was robbed and murdered in her house in northwest Delhi's Rohini, police arrested her tenant on Wednesday.

The accused, Himanshu Yadav, claimed that the woman, Naresh Kumari, had allegedly humiliated and slapped him after he defaulted on rent, leading him to plot the crime.

On October 7, the woman was found dead in her ground-floor house, where she lived alone. She was lying dead on her bed with scratch marks around her neck, indicating that she had been strangled after a brief struggle. Her son was an MCD inspector.


A team formed by deputy commissioner of police (crime) Pankaj Kumar under inspector Ajay Sharma analysed CCTV footage and noticed a person leaving the locality early in the morning. He was later identified as Yadav, a salesman who used to frequently travel outstation for work. Suspicion deepened after the cops couldn't trace him and found his phone had been switched off.

The team then fanned out to several states and pored over footage from more than 1,000 CCTV cameras.

Acting on a tip-off that Himanshu would return to Delhi from Uttar Pradesh to visit relatives and was planning to flee to Nepal, police laid a trap and arrested him from Japanese Park in Rohini.

Himanshu owned an electronics shop, but it shut down. He invested in share market and gaming applications, incurring heavy losses. Following these financial setbacks, he took up work as a salesman. His landlady, who was demanding he cough up rent dues, reportedly reprimanded him on Oct 5. Driven by anger and need for easy money, he decided to kill her and rob her valuables, police said.

Early on Oct 7, Yadav entered the landlady's room. When she woke up, he allegedly strangled her before she could raise an alarm. He then removed the gold earrings and a ring she was wearing before hastily fleeing without scouring the room, fearing someone might enter.

Yadav left Delhi and travelled to Bhiwani in Haryana, where he mortgaged the jewellery for Rs 70,000. Over the next couple of months, he changed his locations frequently, taking care not to stay at one place for more than five days at a stretch, police said. He travelled to Rajasthan, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to evade arrest, before he was finally picked up in Delhi.