Gurugram Police Cremated Yuvraj Before His Family Knew

Gurugram police cremated Yuvraj Singh Manchanda as unidentified on September 14, two days before his Delhi family learned he was dead.

The 31-year-old Adani Realty staffer left a Lajpat Nagar lunch on September 6 after a call from former colleague Anya Vats. Delhi Police later arrested Vats and her husband, Sanyam Sachdeva, from Uttarakhand, and said the pair shot him twice, held his body in a car for five to six hours, and dumped it in a Sector 70 drain.

A Sherwani, Then a Call From Gurugram

Yuvraj lived with his family in Sarita Vihar and was due to marry in a month. On September 6 he went with his sisters to Central Market in Lajpat Nagar to buy a sherwani, then sat down at Golden Dragon in K Block around 4 pm. His elder sister, Harsimran Manchanda, a doctor at a private hospital in Faridabad, was with him. So was their sister Karishma.

After having lunch in a restaurant, he left in our car for Gurugram, saying he had a meeting. He asked us to get a cab in which we returned home.

Harsimran Manchanda, in the missing-person complaint at Lajpat Nagar police station

DCP (Southeast) Vineet Kumar said Yuvraj left around 4 pm after a call, telling his sister he had an urgent meeting in Gurugram and would be home by 10 pm. The last call he took before walking out, police later found, was from Vats. The family spoke to him around 7 pm. Then his phone went off.

When he did not come home, they kept trying his number. On September 8, at 4:16 pm, they got a last WhatsApp message that appeared to come from him. The phone went dead again. That later message is still a hole in the public account of the night. Police have not said who was holding the handset two days after he left the restaurant.

Harsimran filed a missing-person complaint at Lajpat Nagar police station on September 11, five days after he was last seen. Police registered the case under Section 140(3) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. By then, Gurugram already had a body.

Gurugram Police Cremated Him as Unidentified

Badshahpur police pulled a decomposed body from a Sector 70 sewer on the morning of September 10. Inspector Rajesh Bagri, the station house officer, later said the recovery sat in a plot filled with sewerage. Officers treated the dead man as unidentified. They sent the body for autopsy. They cremated it on September 14.

Delhi Police standing orders on missing people and unidentified bodies tell an investigating officer to preserve the body for at least 72 hours in the mortuary and to try to name it. From the morning of September 10, that floor ran to the morning of September 13. The cremation was the next day. Harsimran’s missing complaint had already been on a Delhi police station’s books for three of those days.

The family says Gurugram police did not tell them about the recovery and did not load the case onto the Zonal Integrated Police Network in time. On Wednesday, September 16, Harsimran learned that a Badshahpur officer had uploaded photographs and other details on ZIPNET. She went to the station with relatives and identified her brother from the pictures and from belongings. Identification, police said, also matched the clothes and the physical description in those photographs. They never saw the body. It had already been burned.

THE CLOCK THAT MISSED HIM

Bagri said the autopsy report was awaited and that Gurugram would hand the legal papers, including photographs, to Delhi Police because the missing complaint was filed in the capital. The family has asked that the post-mortem, inquiry papers, photographs, DNA samples, and Yuvraj’s belongings be kept and given to them.

How ZIPNET Was Meant to Match the Files

ZIPNET is the shared police database for missing people and unidentified bodies across Delhi, Haryana, and six other states. Gurugram is in Haryana, so both the Delhi missing file and the Sector 70 body sat on the same network. Standing orders tell officers to inform ZIPNET at once and to hold an unnamed body while they try to match it.

The public ZIPNET list of unidentified dead bodies is built for exactly this pairing. A family can search by date found, age, height, clothing, and state. The catalogue listed 120,543 entries. Delhi Police opened a rebuilt ZIPNET site in May 2025, with bilingual search, for eight member forces: Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Chandigarh. The same service sits on the national portal as a search of unidentified bodies logged by eight state police forces.

The volume behind those pages is not a rare glitch. Delhi Police data for 2018 through 31 July 2022 showed more than 11,000 unidentified bodies found in the city, and fewer than 1,500 of them named. From 2018 to 2021, officers found five to eight such bodies on an average day. Suman Nalwa, then Delhi’s public-relations DCP, said police also have to fix the cause of death, keep the body, and handle the cremation when no one comes. When no one claims a body for 72 hours, police generally perform the last rites. In some cases they wait another 72 hours.

DELHI’S UNIDENTIFIED DEAD

• 2018: 2,991 unnamed bodies found, 331 identified, 20 murder cases logged.
• 2019: 2,602 found, 278 identified, 25 murder cases.
• 2020: 2,215 found, 310 identified, 14 murder cases.
• Through 31 July 2022: 1,542 found, 219 identified, 12 treated as murder.

Aadhaar biometrics cannot be pulled for a criminal probe under Section 29 of the Aadhaar Act, so the photo upload and the missing-person match are the practical tools. In this case those tools had a clean job. A Delhi man was missing. A Haryana drain had an unnamed body. Both states are ZIPNET members. The match that would have stopped a police cremation arrived on September 16, two days after the pyre.

Two Shots in a Car, Then a Drain in Sector 70

Once Lajpat Nagar police pulled Yuvraj’s call records, Vats became the lead. Both phones were off. Officers worked CCTV, technical data, and inquiries at his office and hers. They found a new mobile number in her use and traced it to Uttarakhand. A Delhi team arrested Vats and Sachdeva at Kainchi Dham. Police said the couple have a one-year-old child. A court sent both to five-day police custody.

Police said Anya and Yuvraj had worked together at Emaar. In 2022, both were fired after allegations of financial mismanagement. Yuvraj’s family has claimed he lost that job because of her. He later joined Adani Realty as an HR manager, with work in Sector 29. Police said she did not find another job, and that money issues between them were still open. Relatives told officers she had kept calling him, fighting with him, and making trouble in his work. On September 6 she called again, and he went to meet her.

They left the body inside the car for five to six hours, and then dumped it in the wee hours in a drain near their residence. They then left for Uttarakhand.

Delhi Police officer, on the account given in interrogation

Police said Vats and her husband got him into their car and shot him twice. During questioning, the two allegedly disclosed the killing and the dump near their Gurugram house. A financial dispute is the motive police have named. Yuvraj’s family says Vats is holding back the true reason. Officers are still working the sequence, the forensic trail, and that motive. Nothing in the remand papers, as described so far, closes why a man shopping for his wedding clothes walked into that car.

Harsimran Manchanda Still Does Not Have the Autopsy

Yuvraj was the family’s only earner. His father is paralysed. His mother has heart disease. The sisters bought the sherwani with him and took a cab home on his instruction. Ten days after that lunch, they were looking at mortuary photographs of a man already cremated as a nameless drain recovery.

Bagri said the family identified him at Badshahpur on Wednesday with the help of photographs and belongings. The autopsy, he said, was still awaited. The family has demanded that those records not disappear into the gap between two police districts.

WHAT THE FAMILY HAS ASKED TO SEE

• The autopsy: The post-mortem report from the September 10 recovery, which Gurugram said was still awaited after the cremation.
• The paper trail: Inquiry papers from Badshahpur and Lajpat Nagar, including how the body was logged as unidentified.
• The pictures and DNA: Photographs used on ZIPNET, plus DNA samples taken before the cremation.
• His things: Clothes and other belongings that, police said, helped the family identify him from photographs.

Police have said due process was followed and that the body was badly decomposed. That may explain a fast autopsy. It does not explain why a missing complaint filed on September 11, in a ZIPNET city next door, did not stop a September 14 cremation. The family also wants a straight account of the September 8 WhatsApp. If Yuvraj was already dead, someone else was on his number.

Last Year a Retired Officer Took This to Court

The pairing of a missing-person file and a police cremation is not new. In April 2025 the Supreme Court issued notice on a writ by retired army officer Chacko Karimbil, W.P.(C) No. 255/2025. He said his nephew was reported missing at Vasant Kunj police station on 14 October 2024 and was cremated as unidentified by IGI Airport police on 17 October 2024. The petition said the nephew was from Kerala, that a missing complaint with his Aadhaar and photograph was on file, and that police at the airport station did not make basic efforts to find the family before the cremation.

Justices Surya Kant and N. Kotiswar Singh heard the matter. The writ asked for biometric checks before an unnamed body is burned or buried, an inquiry into the officers, and compensation. It pointed to Standing Order 252/2019 and to ZIPNET, and said both had limited reach. Kerala, the petition noted, was not on ZIPNET. Only eight states were.

Haryana is one of those eight. Delhi is another. The Kerala case turned on a network that did not include the family’s home state. Yuvraj’s case does not have that excuse. The High Court file on ZIPNET duties already records that Delhi Police built the system so missing-person data and unidentified-body data could be shared in real time, including with the public. The same file recites the 72-hour hold and the order to flash wireless messages to station house officers in Delhi and to district chiefs across India.

Karimbil’s petition is a notice, not a final ruling. It still names the same failure the Manchanda family is now living: last rites performed by the state while a missing complaint sits in another station.

Five Days in Custody, Motive Still Open

Vats and Sachdeva were produced in court after the Uttarakhand arrest and remanded to five days of police custody. Delhi Police are using that window to lock the shooting, the dump, the new SIM, and the money dispute they have put at the centre of the case. Gurugram is to transfer autopsy papers and photographs because the missing complaint belongs to Lajpat Nagar. The murder investigation now sits with Delhi. The body does not.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The recovery: An unidentified body came out of a Sector 70 drain on the morning of September 10 and was cremated on September 14.
• The ID: The family named him from ZIPNET photographs and belongings on September 16, after the cremation.
• The accused: Anya Vats and Sanyam Sachdeva were arrested at Kainchi Dham and sent to five-day police custody.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The motive: Police suspect a financial dispute from the 2022 Emaar firing; the family says Vats is withholding the real reason.
• The September 8 message: A WhatsApp arrived from Yuvraj’s number two days after he vanished; police have not said who sent it.
• The autopsy: Badshahpur said the report was awaited even after the family had identified him from photographs.

Delhi Police have five days of custody to pin down the shooting, the dump site, and the money dispute they have named as a motive. Harsimran Manchanda has asked for the autopsy report, the photographs, the DNA samples, and her brother’s belongings. Gurugram police said those papers will be handed to Delhi because the missing complaint was filed in the capital.