Only when his phone was switched off after the morning of September 8 did the panicked family begin frantically searching for him and reach out to the Delhi police.
Police said that questioning them revealed that they allegedly shot Manchanda dead after a heated argument, and they then fled to Uttarakhand. The next day, as the messages came in, there was a slight sense of relief, followed by anxiety – Manchanda had never behaved like this. “It was unusual, but we had no option but to trust him. He would say he’s busy and will come home in a few days. We even received a flight ticket message from his phone. “Vats emerged as a prime suspect. During surveillance, we detected a new mobile number being used by the suspect. Further analysis indicated her presence in Uttarakhand.
From September 6 to 8, we received messages from his phone. On September 10, when his phone was unreachable, we rushed to the police station,” Karishma told HT. In Delhi, on September 11, Yuvraj’s family filed a missing person complaint at the Lajpat Nagar police station in Delhi. On September 16, Manchanda’s former colleague Anya Vats and her partner Sanyam Sachdeva were apprehended in Uttarakhand and then arrested.
He said he was going to Bangalore. On September 10, a body was fished out of a sewer in Gurugram’s Sector 70, and four days later, the Gurugram police “cremated” the body as that of an “unidentified” man, after an autopsy, even as his family – barely 15 km away – was looking for him. A police team was deputed to Uttarakhand, from where Vats and her partner, Sanyam Sachdeva, were apprehended,” the DCP said.
