The last rites of a young woman, strangled by her merciless boyfriend after an argument over his marriage to another woman and her body stuffed into his dhaba's fridge before he went on to his wedding, were conducted on Wednesday at her native village in Haryana's Jhajjar district.

A small cortege took 23-year-old Nikki Yadav's mortal remains from her residence in Kheri Khumar village to the cremation ground at around 6 p.m. The last rites were performed by her father Sunil Yadav and younger brother Shubham.

In the ghastly incident, similar to that of the Shraddha Walkar murder, Nikki, who was residing at a rented accommodation in west Delhi was strangled to death with a mobile charging cable by accused Sahil Gehlot, a resident of Mitraon village hours before his wedding to another woman fixed by his parents.

The murder was committed near the Kashmiri Gate area and Gehlot, a B. Pharma graduate, then drove with the dead body to his dhaba - a distance of around 36 km - where he stuffed her body in a refrigerator and went on with his wedding.

After the rites, the grieving father demanded capital punishment for the accused and said that the family was not aware of her relationship.

Her grandfather Ram Kishan said that she had come home along with her younger sister Nidhi, who also lived with Nikki at the rented accommodation in Delhi's Bindapur area, on December 23 and stayed for 4-5 days.

Sunil Yadav came to know about her daughter's death on Tuesday after he got a call from Delhi Police.

"Last time we spoke to her was on February 9," he said.

"After I hadn't been able to reach my daughter since Saturday (February 11) and I came to know through her friend that she was last seen with Sahil. I called him and for three days he stalled me and finally said that she had gone on vacation to Dehradun and Mussoorie," he said.

"He told me that he could not go as he is getting married and is busy with it," said Sunil adding that when he called Gehlot's parents, they said that he was not at home, and later on they said they were not aware of Nikki and where she is.

Nikki's body was handed over to her family on Wednesday afternoon after an autopsy at Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital in Delhi.

The autopsy report stated that she died of suffocation and there were no other injury marks apart from those on the neck.

According to police, on February 10, input was received that a person named Sahil Gehlot had killed his girlfriend and married another girl on the day of the murder. Gehlot was nabbed by police from the Kair village crossing.

"On sustained interrogation, he disclosed that he had killed his girlfriend, Nikki Yadav, in the intervening night of February 9 and 10 Feb and kept her dead body in a refrigerator at his dhaba in a vacant plot situated on the outskirts of village Mitraon," police had said.

Gehlot further disclosed that in 2018, he met the woman at a coaching center in the Uttam Nagar area of west Delhi where he had joined to prepare for SSC exams.

The accused did not inform his family members about this relationship. His family was putting pressure on him to get married to some other girl and finally in December 2022, the engagement and marriage of the accused with another girl were fixed for February 9 and 10.

Gehlot did not inform Nikki, a MA final-year student, about his engagement or marriage plans. "Somehow she came to know about this and confronted the accused and arguments started between the two. The accused strangulated the deceased with the help of a data cable of his mobile phone kept in his car," police had said. (KB/IANS)