Sagar's father at the hospital.

NEW DELHI: The last thing 23-year-old Sagar did was ask for water from an old friend. The friend’s refusal led Sagar to utter a mild abuse. That, in a city forever on a short fuse, was provocation enough for the friend to kill him in northwest Delhi’s Bharat Nagar early Thursday morning.

“Yahin pyas lagi thi na? (Is this where you were thirsty?)” the accused said while stabbing Sagar repeatedly in his throat, according to the victim’s wife. The attacker, Gaurav, 20, was later nabbed while trying to flee the city, said DCP (northwest) Aslam Khan.

Eyewitnesses, who spoke to TOI, said Gaurav was in such rage that he wanted to attack them too but ran away when he saw more people gathering.

Sagar’s wife, Kirti, who lives separately, said her husband had called her around midnight and asked if she wanted to go out for a stroll. “I agreed since I was not sleepy and he came to pick me up in an auto half-an-hour later. We were not carrying water with us. Five minutes later, the auto driver got into a heated argument with two passersby, so we just paid him and got off. We decided to stroll at the JJ colony there,” said Kirti.

A few minutes later, Sagar said he was feeling thirsty. Since neither of us had money so we could not buy a bottle. And, it was very late. We couldn’t have even asked anyone for water. Coincidently, Sagar saw his childhood friend, Gaurav, who was holding a bottle of water,” she said.

Sagar asked Gaurav if he could have a sip, but got a flat refusal. “They were childhood friends and Sagar found this behaviour very strange, so he called him ‘stupid’ and moved away. I don’t know how this triggered so much anger in Gaurav that he went back to his house and brought a knife from there,” Kirti said.

“Gaurav appeared out of nowhere and then started thrashing Sagar. As Sagar fell on the ground, he started stabbing him on this throat. He repeatedly said this is where you were thirsty, no? I thought that he was punching Sagar as it was too dark for me to see the blood, but it turned out that my husband was being stabbed,” she told TOI.

Gaurav fled towards a market near the JJ colony as people started gathering at the attack site. “When someone pointed the torch towards Sagar I noticed the blood and immediately rushed him to the hospital, where the doctors declared him brought dead,” Kirti said.

Kirti said she had married Sagar three years back. Sagar worked in a factory but had lost his job a year ago and was jobless thereafter. “Since he had not been earning and there were other issues between us, we started living separately six months back,” the women said.

“Even though things were rough between us, we were trying to mend those issues to start anew. This is not something we had imagined in our nightmares,” she said.

Police said that they had formed several teams and in less than 24 hours of the murder, cops managed to track Gaurav down, as he was trying to flee from the city. He confessed to having killed Sagar in a fit of rage.

