By IANS,
New Delhi : A 78-year-old woman was found murdered in her south Delhi home when the family was away at a club to watch the final match of the Indian Premier League (IPL), police said Monday.
The incident comes exactly a week after an elderly couple was found murdered in south Delhi’s Niti Bagh area.
The body of Hanslata Maheshwari was found lying in a pool of blood in the bathroom of her upscale Greater Kailash-II home late Sunday when her son Sudhir Maheshwari and daughter-in-law along with their kids returned from a nearby club after viewing the finals of the Indian Premier League (IPL). She lived on the ground floor.
Sudhir, who was staying with his family on the first floor, found that the house had been broken into. His wife went to check on her mother-in-law and found her dead in the bathroom.
“We went to the club in Alaknanda at around 8 p.m. to watch the match. At around 10 p.m. we returned home and noticed that somebody had broken the front door. My wife later found my mother’s body in the bathroom,” Sudhir, who runs a fruit business in old Delhi, told reporters.
Sudhir said both floors of the house had been ransacked.
Deputy Commissioner of Police H.G.S. Dhaliwal said robbery could be a motive behind the murder.
“The cupboards had been ransacked. Two rooms on the ground and one on the top floor were also ransacked. Initial investigations suggest robbery as motive behind the murder,” Dhaliwal said.
Police are preparing a list of people who visited the house frequently.
Last Monday, the bodies of Ashok Goel, 65, and his wife Lata, 61, were found in a pool of blood in their C-Block home in Niti Bagh.
Police later arrested their domestic aide Mukesh Yadav, a 20-year-old from Bhagalpur in Bihar, for the murder.
The capital has recently witnessed a spate of violent crimes targeting elderly people. In a number of cases, domestic helps have been suspected.
On May 15, B.D. Sharma, a 68-year-old former Air India employee, was stabbed to death by his nephew for money. Both his sons are settled abroad.
On May 11, a 70-year-old woman was found murdered in south Delhi, while an interior designer and his son were drugged in southwest Delhi. Domestic helps were suspected to be behind the crimes in both cases. Police verification of the servants, who are absconding, had not been done.
Last year, 16 senior citizens were killed in the capital. The toll is 13 this year so far.