A video of police officials investigating a crime site which involves blurred-out contents of a fridge has gone viral.
The text on the video reads, “Sanjay and Gulnaz eloped, got married and lived in a rented room. The room was locked for four days. When people broke the door open and checked everything, Gulnaz’s body was found chopped into pieces and in the freezer.” (Translated from Hindi)
A Facebook user shared the video and wrote, “Muslim woman murdered by her Hindu boyfriend after they both were in a live-in relationship in Madhya Pradesh’s Devas.”
SouthCheck found that the claim is false. There is no communal motive for the crime. The woman’s name is Pratibha Prajapati, not Gulnaz.
On searching with relevant keywords, we found a similar video of the incident uploaded by NDTV on January 11, 2025. The video was shared with a report stating that a woman was killed by her live-in partner in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas and her body was kept in a fridge for around eight months. The report further suggested that the woman was pressurising the already married man to marry her, after which her partner Sanjay Patidar killed her and kept her inside the fridge.
In a tweet, ANI Hindi posted a video of the superintendent of police Punit Gehlot giving details of the crime to the media.
In the video, he said the incident happened in the Vrindavan Dham Colony. He mentioned that the name of the victim was Pratibha alias Pinky who was in a live-in relationship with a married man named Sanjay Patidar.
Gehlot said, “We received information that a woman’s body was found in a fridge in Vrindavan Dham Colony. Immediately after receiving the information, we reached the spot. That house belongs to a person named Dhirendra Srivastava who lives in Indore, and he had rented the house to a person named Balbir Rajput. Two rooms of the house were already locked which was done by the people who had rented it before him. Yesterday, that room was cleaned and today morning when an attempt was made to open the fridge in the room, a woman’s body was found in it.”
“Upon investigation, it was found that before Balbir Rajput, a person named Sanjay, who is a resident of Ujjain, used to live here. A woman named Pratibha alias Pinky used to live here with Sanjay. According to the neighbour, the woman was not seen after March 2024. When the police took Sanjay into custody he confessed his crime that he was in a live-in relationship with Pratibha for five years. The accused said that, in early 2024, Pinky was pressuring him for marriage, due to which he, along with his associate Vinod, strangled her to death and hid her body in the fridge,” the SP said.
The Hindu also reported about the incident. According to the report, the victim was identified as Pratibha Prajapati and the accused was Sanjay Patidar. There is no mention that they belong to different faiths.
Hence, we conclude that the viral claim is false.
