News Brief
Swarajya Staff
Jun 30, 2020, 01:27 PM | Updated 01:27 PM IST
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Two days after a woman’s rotting body was discovered from her salon, the Haryana police have arrested a man named Mohammad Arif for her murder.
The woman, Shivani Khobiyaan, was a resident of Kundli area in Sonipat district of Haryana and belonged to a Scheduled Caste. She used to run a salon named Touch and Care. She was a popular social media user with over 1.35 lakh followers on Chinese app Tik Tok, which was declared banned by the Indian government on 29 June.
A policeman at Kundli police station, without wishing to be quoted, told Swarajya on the phone that Arif and Shivani used to be friends, and Arif wanted to marry her. She had stopped talking to him for two weeks. On the night of 26 June, he went to her salon to confront her. He asked him to have nikah with him. A spat followed, and he throttled her to death. He then hid her body in a furniture at the salon, and escaped with her mobile phone.
The police arrested Arif on 29 June. He has been booked (FIR number 277/2020 at Kundli police station) for murder and under the SC/ST Atrocity Act.
A report in The Week says that Arif kept Shivani “virtually alive” for two days, that is, he continued to post videos on her Tik Tok account after she was murdered in order to mislead her family.
The report quotes Shivani’s sister Shweta as saying that Shivani told her on 26 June that Arif had come to meet him. Shivani did not return all night and texted that she was in Haridwar and was doing fine, and would be back on 30 June.
It was only on Sunday night that a friend, Neeraj, discovered her body when he went to her salon after locals complained of stench.
Recently, a woman from Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad was murdered by a man named Sherkhan Choudhary after she refused to accept his offer of nikah. The victim, Naina Kaur, was scheduled to marry a man from her Sikh community five days later. Sherkhan was a popular Tik Tok Star with over 4 lakh followers on the app.