A reputed surgeon of Gorakhpur, Dr Dharmendra Pratap Singh, allegedly killed his ex-wife Rakhi Srivastava aka Rajeshwari by pushing off a cliff at Pokhra in Nepal, but kept her virtually alive for seven months through a ruse that she was in Assam by keeping her social media account updated till the case was exposed.
According to a report published in the TOI, the doctor and his two accomplices, Promode Kumar Singh and Deeshdeepak Nishad, were arrested from Daudpur area of Gorakhpur and sent to jail on Saturday.
Initially, police had nabbed Rakhis’s second husband Manish Sinha for questioning after her family had filed a case against him after she went missing in June this year. Ultimately, the trail took the Special Task Force (STF) of the UP Police to her first husband, Dr Singh who runs a nursing home in Gorakhpur. The case was finally cracked.
The STF IG Amitabh Yash told media, “Rakhi was missing from Gorakhpur and her brother Amar Prakash Srivastav lodged a missing/kidnapping report with Shahpur police on June 24,2018, under Sections 366,506 of IPC against Manish, a resident of Gaya in Bihar.”
During the probe, the STF came to know that Rakhi had gone to Nepal along with Manish on June 1, But she stayed back while returned. Since Dr Singh was also under the purview of the probe, police gathered his call details, which revealed that he too was in Nepal at the time when Rakhi went missing. He phone was active in Pokhra I Nepal during June 1 to 4. A STF team rushed to Pokhra where local police informed them that they had recovered a body of woman in the first week of June. The STF identified the body to be that of Rakhi.
“This made Dr Singh a prime suspect. After sustained interrogation, he confessed to have killed Rakhi as she was blackmailing him to get money and property,” the IG told the media.
In fact, the last location of Rakhi’s mobile phone number was traced to Guwahati on October 4. The STF and Rakhi’s family kept believing that she was in Guwahati. However, after his arrest, Dr Singh confessed that he had sent the mobile phone to Guwahati through an aide who had dropped it there.