Meerut: In the much-anticipated trial of the Saurabh Rajput murder case, better known as the Blue Drum murder case, a court in Meerut on Wednesday held both the accused, Muskan Rastogi, and her lover, Sahil Shukla, guilty of murder and concealing Saurabh Rajput’s body.
The court has yet to fix the date for the pronouncement of sentence.
“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 said.
“All the evidence presented by the prosecution was found complete by the court. Even though it’s the court’s decision, we will demand a death sentence. Generally, in cases like these, the minimum punishment is a life sentence, and the maximum punishment is death,” he added.
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.
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. Post-mortem findings confirmed that he’d been stabbed to death.
Earlier, Saurabh’s elder brother Rahul spoke to IANS and said, “We just want one thing: whatever they did to my brother, the same should happen to them.”
The case was brought before the court on 17 March 2025, while Muskan and Sahil were sent to Meerut jail two days later. The trial was transferred to the district judge’s court in July 2025, with arguments continuing for around 13 months.
The case has seen 126 hearings and testimonies, with the prosecution and defence presenting their arguments before District Judge Arvind Kumar Mishra. The prosecution has sought the death penalty for both.
According to the police investigation, on March 3, 2025, Muskan Rastogi sedated her husband, Saurabh Rajput, at their home by lacing his food. Her lover Sahil Shukla arrived shortly after, and the duo stabbed Saurabh 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.
(IANS)
