GURGAON: A 22-year-old ITI trainee arrested last week for sneaking 32 guns out of a Faridabad police station’s storage room during his apprenticeship has stunned cops with another revelation that he strangled his cousin and threw the body into a canal last July.Faridabad police spokesperson Yashpal Yadav on Friday said that after the confession, they have filed murder charges under BNS Section 103 against Monu and his girlfriend Sarita, allegedly an accomplice in the crime. Sarita was arrested earlier this week.On July 9 last year, a missing person’s complaint was filed at Sector 56 police station in Faridabad after Shivam, 19, disappeared. The family searched for him but found no leads. Police have now engaged divers to look for the body, based on Monu’s statement.So far, they have found the teenager’s slipper from the canal.Monu, police said, killed Shivam after Sarita accused him of making improper advances towards her. Sarita allegedly called Shivam to her house on the pretext of meeting him and served him tea laced with sleeping pills.Once he became unconscious, the two allegedly smothered him with a pillow. They then transported the body on a bike late that night, propping it between them, and dumped it in the canal, police said.
How the case unfolded
Shivam’s brother, Vishal, said the family long suspected Monu and had even conveyed their suspicion to the police. He claimed that during this period, Monu joined the police department as part of his ITI apprenticeship and was handling computer work at Sector 8 police station.The family alleged that Monu influenced the course of the initial inquiry. While police rejected the charges, Shivam’s family said police did not pursue a thorough investigation despite their suspicion.Monu was among the 20 people arrested on June 27 after it came to light that he stole 32 weapons, including foreign-made pistols, from the Sector 8 police station ‘malkhana’, a room where seized items, evidence and records are stored, between Oct 2025 and April 2026 and routed them to an inter-state illegal network.According to police, Monu allegedly lifted the weapons one by one and passed them to his maternal cousin Vipin, who then handed them to Sanjay, a resident of Tijara in Rajasthan. Sanjay, police said, used his network to push the stolen weapons into Dharuhera, Bhiwadi, Rewari, Noida, Palwal and Nuh.The theft was detected in May, when SHO Rajbir Singh found discrepancies in the weapon register during a routine inspection and ordered an audit that subsequently found that 32 firearms were missing.While technical surveillance and field operations helped cops recover all the weapons, ASI Bijender Singh, in charge of the armoury, was suspended for negligence. The ASI is also facing a departmental inquiry.
