Five days after Pune businessman Ketan Vishal Agarwal’s death was registered as an accidental fall during a trek, investigators have arrested his 20-year-old fiancée and her boyfriend for pushing Agarwal down a 400-foot gorge in Lohagad Fort, with the intention of killing him.
Agarwal, 25, was a director in his family’s company, Success Group, which is one of the largest warehouse developers in Maharashtra. He returned to Pune in 2023 after earning his master’s degree from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to join the family business. In February this year, he got engaged to Siya Goyal, 20, with his uncle acting as matchmaker. Goyal also hails from a wealthy business family in Pune. But the Agarwals did not know that she was in love with Chetan Chaudhary, 22, whose family runs a business in the same commercial area where Goyal’s father lives.
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Agarwal and Goyal were scheduled to get married in November this year as hotels were booked for him in Udaipur. However, on June 18, Sia insisted that Ketan Agarwal take her on a walk to Lohagad Fort as a gift on her 20th birthday the next day, and that she would wait for him near Kewali Bridge on the Pune-Mumbai Expressway. At 10.45am, her mother called his family to tell them that Ketan had slipped down a gorge in Lohagad while taking photos. “Initially we registered an accidental death report, but during the investigation, some family details and data made us rethink the investigation,” Pune Rural Police Superintendent Sandeep Singh Gill said.
He said Ketan Agarwal was a regular traveler in Lohagad and was well acquainted with the terrain. In their statement, the Agarwal family also raised some doubts about Sia, following which the police examined her phone and looked into other forensic details. It soon came to light that she and Chetan Chaudhary were in a relationship for more than a year, and they tried in many ways to express her reluctance to marry Ketan Agarwal.
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Earlier this month, Ketan and she were scheduled to go to Bali for a pre-wedding photo shoot, which was foiled when the couple reached the Mumbai airport and discovered that Ketan’s passport was missing. Investigations after his death revealed that Sia had hidden his passport to avoid the trip. Then again, four days before his death, the couple went on a trip to Lohagad where Ketan pushed, saying she had spotted a snake and was trying to save it. On June 18, Sia once again insisted on going on a trip before her birthday on June 19. “Through the call log data, we were able to find out that Chetan Chaudhary was also in Lohagad at the same time when Ketan and Siya were there,” SP Gill said. The accused allegedly confessed to committing the murder, which was reminiscent of the ‘honeymoon murder’ of Indore resident Raja Raghuvanshi in the forests of Meghalaya last year.
Ketan Agarwal’s father, Vishal Agarwal, 46, told HT that his son raised concerns about Sia’s behaviour, which the family ignored.
“After the engagement in February, Ketan and Sia met frequently and went out together. At times, Ketan expressed his concerns about Sia and asked us if we had properly verified her ancestry. But since her family was connected to us through our extended family network, I reassured him that everything was fine,” he said.
Agarwal said the young couple would often fight over a minor issue, and Sia was always on her phone. He said Ketan also mentioned Chetan Chaudhary’s name to him which raised suspicions about a possible relationship with Sia. He added: “We thought about postponing the wedding because she was very young, but her parents insisted on going ahead with it because they would not find a partner like my son.”
The accused have been booked for murder and conspiracy under Sections 103 and 61 (2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and have been remanded in custody.
