Friends murder man for ransom, cremate him as a COVID-19 patient

Gulf Today Report

It is said that wicked people always look for opportunity even in tragedies. This is what exactly happened in Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, when a group of youths took advantage of the raging pandemic to kidnap and kill their own friend for ransom.

They cremated his body at Balkeshwar Ghat in the Uttar Pradesh by passing it off as remains of a coronavirus patient.

Sachin Chauhan, 25, who was the only son of cold storage owner Suresh Chauhan and was kidnapped on June 21 and was murdered the same night.

The murderers have planned to seek Rs20 million ransom from Sachin’s parents.

After getting a tip-off, police detained five people including Sachin's close friend Harsh Chauhan, who is son of his father's business partner.

Apart from Harsh, Sachin Aswani, 32, Happy Khanna, 35, Manoj Bansal, 30, Rinku, 25 were also arrested.

They all have confessed to the murder.

Initial investigation revealed that Sachin and Harsh used to frequently visit a sports club owned by Aswani in Agra.

Sachin befriended Aswani and began to borrow money from him and gradually the amount money borrowed by Sachin reached Rs400,000

Whenever Aswani asked Sachin to return the money, he kept on making excuses.

This is when Aswani and Harsh planned to kidnap Sachin and demand Rs20 million from his father.

The called Sachin for a get together at Khaspur village on June 21 and smothered him to death.

According to police statement, they then bought PPE kits and after fully covering themselves, cremated his body at Balkeshwar under a fake name.

They immersed his ashes in Yamuna the following day.

In their bid to mislead the police Happy's friend Manoj Bansal took Sachin's mobile phone to Kanpur.

They entrusted Manoj to make the ransom call but he could not gather courage to do so.

However, inspite of all they planning they made a mistake of giving one of their relative’s number at the ghat which proved to be their undoing.