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Gujarat Man Who Police Say Confessed to 12 Poisoning Murders Dies in Custody

Navalsinh Chavda, arrested in Ahmedabad on December 3 over an alleged plot to poison a businessman, died on December 8, 2024, after police said he confessed to 12 killings.

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Illustration: sealed brown paper evidence bags and envelopes on a table

Navalsinh Chavda had been in police custody in Ahmedabad for five days when, at about 10 a.m. on Sunday, December 8, 2024, he fell ill. Officers sent him by ambulance to the civil hospital, where doctors declared him dead on arrival. He was 42. By then, according to police, the man who called himself a "bhuvaji" and claimed the power to work magic and miracles had confessed to killing 12 people by giving them sodium nitrite dissolved in water during occult rituals.

Deputy Commissioner of Police Shivam Verma laid out the count. Chavda admitted, Verma said, to one killing in Ahmedabad, six in Surendranagar, three of them members of his own family, three in Rajkot, and one each in Wankaner, in Morbi district, and Anjar, in Kutch. One of the dead was a man whose body turned up in the Aslali area of Ahmedabad in August 2021, in what looked at the time like a road accident, until a post-mortem pointed to poisoning. The investigation had also shown, Verma said, that Chavda killed his grandmother the same way about 14 years earlier, and his mother and his uncle about a year earlier. He died before any court could test the confession police described.

He had been arrested over a killing police said he was on his way to commit. Police said the Sarkhej force picked him up at around 1 a.m. on December 3 as he was on his way to murder a businessman, after the man who ran a taxi business with him, and in whom he had confided the plan, tipped them off. Gujarat Samachar reported that Chavda had promised his intended victim he could turn one rupee into four through occult practice and had summoned him to Sanathal on December 1, where the man was to be served a drink laced with poison. The plan, as that account described it, was to make the death pass for a heart attack or an accident and take his money. Officers found the man unharmed. Police then won custody of Chavda until 3 p.m. on December 10 to look into his occult practices and his possible involvement in human sacrifices.

What police went on to describe was a poison that could pass for natural causes. Chavda had heard about the chemical from another tantrik and bought it from a laboratory in Surendranagar, his hometown. It took effect 15 to 20 minutes after it was swallowed, an official said, and several of the victims died of heart attacks; how some of the others died was still under investigation. He offered to multiply people's wealth or solve their problems, police said, and he kept an ashram at Wadhwan, in Surendranagar, where he practiced black magic. Officers had recovered ritual items and a white powder from his vehicle. In the days before his death, investigators took him to the Wadhwan shrine to gather evidence, recorded statements from shopkeepers who had sold him the chemical and were looking into whether anyone had helped him.

Gujarat Samachar reported that on the morning he died, Chavda vomited and collapsed before officers rushed him to the hospital. Because he died in custody, a judicial inquiry was ordered, and a postmortem was begun to establish the cause of death. "We are conducting a transparent investigation into the circumstances of his death," Verma said. "The postmortem report will guide further action."

Accounts of the arrest differ by a few hours. The Press Trust of India, quoting police, put it at around 1 a.m. on December 3, 2024; Gujarat Samachar described the operation as taking place on December 2. The same Gujarat Samachar report calls the chemical sodium nitrite in one passage and sodium nitrate in another, while police, through PTI, named sodium nitrite. The cause of Chavda's death had not been reported when the story broke.

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