Tandoor murder: 30 years on, echoes of a killing that shook Delhi's conscience

Hindustan Times

02-07-2025

On the night of July 2, thirty years ago, flames rose from the chimney of a Connaught Place restaurant, carrying with them the smoke of a crime that would haunt the Capital's conscience for decades. It was late—well past closing time—and the restaurant, Bagiya Barbeque, had already shut. But someone was still inside, stoking the fire of a tandoor that hid a horrifying secret. Anaro Devi, a vendor, who first raised the alarm. (HT Photo)
The body of Naina Sahni, 29, lay charred inside. Her partner, Delhi Youth Congress chief Sushil Sharma, had allegedly shot her at home and then attempted to dispose of her body in the restaurant he part-owned—Bagiya Barbeque, located inside Ashok Yatri Niwas, a government-run ITDC hotel in Connaught Place.
The murder and attempted disposal of Sahni's body led to a media storm and public shock, intensified by Sharma's political stature and the sheer brazenness of the crime. The next morning, headlines carried words like 'ghoulish,' 'grisly,' and 'unthinkable.' Hindustan Times, in an editorial later that week, likened the incident to the plot of an Agatha Christie novel—only crueler.
A chain of witnesses
The police timeline would later reconstruct a sequence of rage, panic, and attempted concealment. Investigators said Sharma suspected Sahni of having an affair with her former classmate and fellow party worker, Matloob Karim. That evening, after a heated argument at their Mandir Marg home, he allegedly shot her at close range with his licensed revolver.
With her body in the boot of his white Maruti 800, Sharma drove to the restaurant and summoned Keshav Kumar, the manager. According to the police, Sharma instructed Kumar to remove everyone form the premises, citing an emergency. Later, he allegedly enlisted Kumar's help in lifting Sahni's body out of the car and onto the restaurant tandoor—a large clay oven used since centuries in north Indian eateries for roasting meats and bread.
Kumar, detained early in the investigation, would later become the first crucial link in the chain of events, confessing his role and naming Sharma as the killer.
But what made the police act in the first place was a seemingly minor detail: a smell.
First response, and a suspicion confirmed
That night, constable Abdul Nazir Kunju and home guard Chander Pal were patrolling the quiet Janpath lane when an elderly vegetable vendor approached them, visibly agitated. Anaro Devi, who had long sold produce to Bagiya Barbeque, pointed to the smoke and flames from the rear side of Bagiya Barbeque. Something wasn't right, she insisted.
At first, a security guard outside the compound claimed that there was nothing to worry about. But the dense smoke — and the acrid, unmistakable stench of burning flesh — told a different story.
Kunju and Pal scaled the boundary wall and entered the premises. 'We saw the manager stoking the fire. He claimed he was burning old political banners,' Kunju recalled.
'The wireless set I was carrying was not working due to low battery, so I rushed to Windsor Court and used the PWD office's landline phone to inform the police and the fire brigade about the blaze,' Kunju said over the phone from Kerala where he now resides.
When the fire brigade arrived, they doused the flames and prepared to leave—until a body was discovered inside the tandoor. The remains were only partially burnt. The pungent smell, the position of the body, and the visible traces of hair and skin stunned the police.
Sub-inspector Rajesh Kumar soon arrived and took manager Kumar into custody. What had started as a routine fire response had suddenly escalated into suspected homicide.
The tandoor trail
Inspector Niranjan Singh, who had taken over as station house officer of Connaught Place just four months earlier, was roused from his official quarters in Mandir Marg around midnight. 'The duty officer said there was a woman's body in a tandoor. I asked him to repeat it. I couldn't believe it,' he said.
At the scene, Singh met Kunju, Pal, and Devi, and walked into the restaurant's now-blackened kitchen. 'The body was lying horizontally on the tandoor. One leg was still inside the mouth of the oven. Part of the face had not caught fire. It was surreal,' he recalled.
Kumar, under questioning, revealed how Sharma had arrived with the body and insisted that it be incinerated immediately. He also told the police that the body had been transported from Sharma's flat and brought into the restaurant in the boot of a small white car.
Hours later, police recovered Sharma's Maruti 800, abandoned on Kautilya Marg in Chanakyapuri. There were traces of blood in the trunk.
A home wiped clean
When police arrived at Sharma's Mandir Marg apartment, they found the flat locked. They forced open the door and found the floor had been freshly washed. There was no body, no signs of a struggle—except one detail. A bullet hole in the plywood covering the AC unit. Forensics combed the apartment, recovering spent bullet casings, bloodied strands of hair, and a cherry-red diary filled with handwritten notes. One read: 'Sushil Sharma loves Naina. Naina loves Sushil Sharma.'
Pereira would later describe the scene as one of 'meticulous wiping, but with emotional oversights'.
A difficult identification
Though investigators quickly suspected that the charred remains were Sahni's, official identification proved elusive. Police used address records to locate her parents—but what followed surprised the investigators.
'Her mother was clearly in shock but declined to cooperate,' Singh said. 'We needed confirmation for the post-mortem and prosecution.' Pereira, who was then additional commissioner of police (New Delhi range), later wrote that the family's reluctance was 'a major source of frustration'.
Eventually, on July 5, the body was identified by Karim, Sahni's friend and party colleague—the same man Sharma had accused her of being involved with.
Sharma disappears
By the time the investigation gathered pace, Sharma had vanished. He had spent the night of the murder at Gujarat Bhawan and then travelled to Jaipur, from where he flew to Chennai. Eventually, he surfaced in Bengaluru, where he surrendered before the police on July 10.
'The breakthrough came from a tip-off through local media,' Singh said. But there was a problem. The Delhi Police, worried about press coverage, requested that Sharma not be brought directly to court. Instead, Karnataka Police led SHO Singh and his team to historical ruins near the city court.
'He was calm,' Singh recalled. 'He had shaved his head, worn a kurta-pyjama, and had just returned from Tirupati. There, away from the media, he narrated the whole sequence—how he killed Sahni, brought the body to the restaurant, and tried to destroy all traces.'
On the night of July 10, Sharma was brought back to Delhi under heavy security.
In 2003, a city court awarded Sharma the death sentence, calling the murder 'brutal and premeditated'. The court ruled, 'There cannot be a better case for awarding the death penalty than the present one.'
Kumar, the restaurant manager, was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment.
The Delhi high court upheld the death sentence in 2007. But in 2013, the Supreme Court commuted it to life imprisonment, stating that while the act was horrifying, there was no conclusive evidence that Sharma had chopped the body—despite early reports to the contrary.
In 2018, citing good jail conduct, the Delhi high court ordered his release. Sharma had by then served 23 years in prison. The court also questioned the sentence review board's reasoning, noting that the brutality argument was weakened by the apex court's own conclusions.
Sharma was released without fanfare and has kept a low profile since. He declined to speak for this story.
A city changed and yet the same
Ashok Yatri Niwas, the ITDC hotel that housed Bagiya Barbeque, was shut down in 2003. The restaurant never reopened. The land it stood on now serves as a paid parking lot adjacent to a luxury hotel in Connaught Place. Shoppers, diners, and valets use the space without knowing the story that once simmered beneath it.
But some memories refuse to fade.
Anaro Devi, the woman who first raised the alarm, still sits on the same footpath, selling vegetables. Her shanty was recently demolished. She now sleeps under the open sky—her string cot tied to a pole, a sheet of tarpaulin flapping overhead.
'I don't remember much. But I remember that smell. That fire,' she said. 'I never thought I'd be part of something like that. But I was.'