Families met in Feb, engaged in a week: The hasty Ketan-Siya wedding plan

Ketan Agarwal’s family had emphatically denied that his fiancee, Siya Goyal, could have anything to do with his shocking death at Lohagad Fort, saying “she is our own”, but the police went ahead with their routine inquiry and ended up uncovering a chilling murder plot.

A police officer part of the investigation said 25-year-old Ketan’s family was asked if they suspected any foul play in his death at Lohagad Fort near Pune on June 18. The family defended 20-year-old Siya and told the cops that they did not want unwanted controversies. “But as a procedure, some basic inquiry to piece together the sequence had to be done,” said the officer.

And as the inquiry progressed, police found clues clearly pointing to how Siya and her boyfriend, Chetan Choudhary, allegedly plotted and executed Ketan’s murder.

The cops also found that the families of Ketan and Siya fixed their wedding in February, and they were engaged just a week after the families met.

What CCTV footage showed

On June 21, three days after Ketan died after falling off the fort and 350 metres into a gorge, a team from Lonavala Rural police station visited the fort. The cops checked footage from the CCTV cameras and spotted a man in a hoodie close behind Ketan and Siya. In the footage, Siya is seen giving what appeared to be a signal to the man in the hoodie, and the latter responds.

“While checking the CCTV footage, we saw a man moving close to Ketan and Siya; he looked suspicious. On a hot day, he was wearing a hoodie to hide his face… The focus of our CCTV analysis was just Ketan and Siya till then, but we also started checking this man in a hoodie. We found that Siya kept looking back every two to three minutes at this man in a hoodie. At one point, Siya is seen taking her hand near her face and signalling something, and the man in the hoodie responds to that signal. This strengthened our suspicion,” said an officer part of the probe.

Shift in Siya’s statements

A police officer said, “A suspicious finding was the time taken by the man in the hoodie to climb up and down the fort. He climbed up and down in 48 minutes. This suggested he was on the fort for less than 10 minutes, considering 25-odd minutes taken to climb up and 15 minutes to come down. Who goes to a historic hill fort to stay at the top for just 8-10 minutes?”

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“In her initial statements to the police, Siya had said Ketan slipped and fell off the cliff when they were taking photos. But later, when we spoke to her at length, she said that she was tired after they climbed the fort. She said she sat down to rest and asked Ketan for a bottle of water. And while handing her a bottle, Ketan lost his balance and slipped. This shift in statement was another big inconsistency. The suspicion on this front was confirmed after the police found not a single photo taken at the fort on Ketan’s phone that day. The spot where Siya said they stopped for rest has almost no space to sit, and is secluded from other, better accessible rest spots. The spot is not easily visible. This seemed premeditated. By cross- referencing Siya’s calls to Chetan, we confirmed that he was the man in the hoodie,” the officer said.

Chetan had a plan to hoodwink the cops, the police officer said. He had kept his phones at home and brought the phone of a staffer working in his family’s grocery business, they said. “This confirmed that it was a conspiracy,” the officer added.

Earlier, police detailed how Siya allegedly sabotaged a trip to Bali, where she and Ketan were to have a pre-wedding photoshoot. Police have said she hid Ketan’s passport and they had to return from Mumbai after he could not find his passport at the airport. Siya took Ketan to Lohagad twice before June 18, but the murder plan could not be executed on both occasions, police have found. But she had allegedly pushed him once before the fatal incident.

A match fixed in haste

Ketan was the son of prominent real estate businessman Vishal Agarwal and a director in the family-run firm. And Siya is a commerce student who recently started a bakery business. She was in a relationship with Chetan, who is pursuing a BBA course in Pune. While Siya’s family is in the business of spices and dry fruits, Chetan’s family has a grocery business.

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Siya and Chetan, police have found, have been in a relationship since October last year.

Ketan had returned after completing his Master’s degree in Boston, US. In February this year, his family travelled to Gulbarga in Karnataka for a wedding. It was at this wedding that he and his family met Siya and her family, who too were attending the wedding. The two families have known each other since the 1990s, the police said.

On February 12 and 13, the police found, families of Siya and Ketan discussed their match. Just a week later, on February 19, the two were engaged at a hotel in Pune. Police have said the families planned a destination wedding in Rajasthan later this year. A palace was booked for the grand wedding, and two special flights chartered to fly in relatives to Rajasthan.