Meerut: A court in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut on Wednesday sentenced ‘Blue Drum murder case’ convicts Muskan Rastogi and her lover Sahil Shukla to death for killing her husband Saurabh Rajput and sealing up his dismembered body in a drum.
The Meerut district court had, on September 30, held both Rastogi and Shukla guilty of murder and concealing Rajput’s body.
According to the police investigation, on March 3, 2025, Muskan sedated her husband, Saurabh Rajput, at their home by lacing his food. Shukla arrived shortly after, and the duo stabbed Rajput to death before dismembering his body in the bathroom. Seeking to suppress the odour of decomposition, they packed the dismembered body parts into a large blue plastic drum, filled it with a freshly mixed wet compound of sand, water, and cement, and sealed it, the probe had revealed.
The case was brought before the court on March 17, 2025, and transferred to the district judge’s court in July 2025, with arguments continuing for around 13 months before the verdict was announced.
The case has seen 126 hearings and testimonies, with the prosecution and defence presenting their arguments before the District Judge.
“The court found both the accused, Muskan and Sahil, guilty of murder and hiding Saurabh’s body. We had presented 22 testimonies on different occasions. The case was based on circumstantial evidence. We had presented the circumstances in a sequence. All the testimonies corroborated the prosecution’s case,” Prosecutor Vijay Bahadur had said after the conviction.
He said that all the evidence the prosecution presented was found complete by the court, adding that they would demand a death sentence for the convicts.
“Generally, in cases like these, the minimum punishment is a life sentence, and the maximum punishment is death,” he said.
The prosecution presented a series of circumstantial evidence, along with technical and physical evidence. Local shopkeepers testified to selling the specific blue plastic drum, cement bags, sand, cleavers, and razors to Rastogi and Shukla before the murder of Rajput, who was stabbed to death.
Call detail records and mobile signal tower locations placed Shukla at the residence during the time of the commission of the crime and traced the duo’s joint movement to hotel stays in Shimla and Manali in Himachal.
Earlier, Rajput’s elder brother Rahul told IANS that the family’s only demand was justice. “We just want one thing: whatever they did to my brother, the same should happen to them.”
(IANS)
