The police claimed on Tuesday that two men who had been hired by a shopkeeper in south Delhi’s Jamia Nagar to paint his house and business had killed him late on Monday.
Police tracked down the phone and the two suspects 20 kilometres away in Paharganj.
The two suspects admitted to the police that they planned to rob the shopkeeper after discovering last week that he had a balance of Rs 40,000 in his online wallet PayTM while he was using the mobile application to make a payment. They were apprehended just hours after the crime.
According to Esha Pandey, deputy commissioner of police for the south-east area, the murder of Islam Ahmad was reported just after midnight on Monday.
“Our police team reached the shop in Jamia Nagar where Islam Ahmad was found dead with stab injuries on his neck. He was rushed to the Trauma Centre where doctors declared him dead on arrival. We registered a case of murder and began the probe,” Pandey said.
The deceased had a shoe store in Saheen Bagh.
According to the police, Islam Ahmad’s son told detectives that he thought the two painters might have been responsible for his father’s murder. The man’s cell phone was first placed under monitoring as it was missing.
“The technical surveillance of the victim’s phone showed its location in Paharganj. Based on this, our team searched over 180 hotels and guest houses in Paharganj. Finally, we found them along with the victim’s phone near a guest house in the area. They were taken into custody,” a police officer who investigated the case said.
The two suspects, Mehraj Alam (32), and Taufiq Kalam (21), both of Muzzafarpur, Bihar, admitted to investigators that they were employed by Ahmad to complete the paint job. “While painting Ahmad’s shop, they saw that he had a 40,000 balance in his PayTM account. They then planned the robbery and came to his shop on Monday night. They stabbed him multiple times and stole the phone,” the officer said.