Late in the evening on Sunday, December 1, 2024, a 24-year-old taxi driver named Jigar Gohil walked into the Sarkhej police station in Ahmedabad. According to the police inspector who heard him, he had an urgent warning. "He killed four people, including my brother, and he is about to kill someone again," Gohil said, as the Times of India later quoted him. "We need to save a life."
The man he was talking about was his business partner, Navalsinh Chavda, a 42-year-old from Wadhwan in Surendranagar district who drove a taxi, ran a YouTube channel about occult practice and called himself a "bhuva," a kind of spirit medium. Police went to a secluded spot in the Mumatpura area, found Chavda with a young businessman from Sanand, and took Chavda into custody. The businessman was unharmed.
Over the next week, police officers in Ahmedabad told reporters that Chavda had confessed to poisoning 12 people with sodium nitrite over about 14 years, among them his own grandmother, mother and uncle. On the morning of December 8, before any of it had been presented to a court, he collapsed in police custody and died. He was never tried. Everything below about the 12 deaths is what police said he told them, and what police said their own investigation had found, as reported in the Indian press. None of it was tested by a judge, and Chavda was never able to answer it in court.
Very little about Navalsinh Chavda's early life appears in the reporting. Police and the press gave his age as 42 in December 2024, which places his birth around 1982. He came from Wadhwan, a town in Surendranagar district in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, and police called Surendranagar his hometown. He was married; his wife's name was given as Sonal Chavda. He had a son, and the Sarkhej police inspector, R. K. Dhulia, said the family had moved to Vejalpur, a suburb of Ahmedabad, about seven months before the arrest so that the boy could get cricket coaching. The Times of India gave his Ahmedabad address as Akshardham Society, near the Vejalpur police post.
In Wadhwan, police said, Chavda had set up a small temple or ashram where he performed rituals. He presented himself as a "bhuvaji," a man with the power to work magic and miracles, and, in the words of the Press Trust of India's police sources, he "would offer to multiply his victims' wealth or solve their problems." Inspector Dhulia told the Times of India that Chavda called himself the bhuva of a goddess and drew his clients from family members, friends and acquaintances. He also ran a taxi service and posted videos of his rituals to a YouTube channel. One Times of India report described him as a man "who maintained multiple identities as a YouTuber, witchdoctor, taxi operator and Ponzi scammer," a description attributed to police.
None of the sources reached for this page reports his schooling, his work before the taxi business, any earlier criminal record or how long he had practiced as a bhuva.
The story of the arrest, as police first told it, began with a death in August 2021. On August 23 of that year, Aslali police found the body of a young man near Kamod village on the edge of Ahmedabad, with his motorcycle. He was Vivek Gohil, 23, of Nikol, in the eastern part of the city. Police registered a case of death by negligent driving against an unknown driver. The Times of India noted that his body bore no injury marks and the motorcycle had no damage, and that a postmortem examination pointed to poisoning. Police later said the postmortem report indicated sodium nitrite. The case was nonetheless closed as a road accident, according to a statement the Sarkhej police gave in December 2024.
Vivek's older brother, Jigar, did not accept that account, police said. He came to suspect Chavda, a close family friend, after learning that Vivek had been in touch with him shortly before he died. Inspector Dhulia told the Times of India that Jigar spent about three years gathering information. He went into a taxi partnership with Chavda: Chavda drove the shared car by day and Jigar by night. "He gathered every little detail about Chavda," Dhulia said. "He gained Chavda's trust so completely that he learned of the planned murder, including where the poison was hidden, the car's spare tyre."
The planned target, according to police, was Abhijeetsinh Rajput, a 29-year-old businessman who lived in a bungalow development in Navapura, Sanand, and who was described as a distant relative of Chavda. Police said Chavda had promised Rajput that a tantrik ritual would quadruple his money, and planned to take him to Mumatpura, give him liquor mixed with poison and keep the money. Police said Chavda had offered Jigar a quarter of whatever he took, and that Jigar recorded the plan on his phone. When Chavda drove Rajput to the spot, Jigar went to the police. A Sarkhej team went to Mumatpura and arrested Chavda.
Gujarati and Hindi reports gave some further detail. The Hindi news site Aaj Tak, citing the Zone 7 deputy commissioner, Shivam Verma, said Jigar had himself been brought into the Sanand plan before he went to police. Gujarat Samachar, cited on the site's earlier news page, reported that the drink was meant to make Rajput's death pass for a heart attack or an accident.
The reported date and hour of the arrest vary. The Press Trust of India, quoting police, put it at about 1 a.m. on December 3, 2024. Several Times of India reports give December 1, the day Jigar went to the station; another says December 2. The likeliest reading of the reports together is that Jigar went to police on the night of December 1 and the formal arrest was recorded in the early hours afterward, but the sources do not settle it.
Sarkhej police booked Chavda under sections 55 (abetment of an offense punishable with death or life imprisonment), 62 (attempting to commit an offense punishable with life imprisonment) and 318(1) and (2) (cheating) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, India's criminal code. They also booked him under the Gujarat Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, 2024, a state law passed earlier that year. The Times of India reported that the punishment under that act runs from six months to seven years in prison and a fine of 5,000 to 50,000 rupees.
A rural court in Ahmedabad district remanded him to police custody for seven days, to 3 p.m. on December 10. In the remand application, police said they had recovered ritual items and a white powder from his vehicle, showed the court videos of Chavda performing rituals that they said came from YouTube, and told the court they needed to reconstruct crime scenes, look for accomplices and find out whether he had taken part in human sacrifice. Chavda's lawyer, whose name was not reported, opposed the remand. He argued that his client was cooperating and that the necessary evidence had already been recovered. The court found the investigation incomplete and granted the remand.
During the remand, police said, the powder from the spare tire was sent for forensic testing. A senior officer told the Times of India that when Chavda was asked about the packet, he said it was salt, which he kept to season food he ate while driving. The result of the forensic test was not reported in the sources found.
The scope of the case grew quickly. On December 4 and 5, police told reporters that Chavda was suspected in four deaths: Vivek Gohil and three members of the Patadia family of Surendranagar. By December 8 the number police gave was 12.
Deputy Commissioner Shivam Verma set out the count to the Press Trust of India: one death in Ahmedabad, six in Surendranagar (three of them members of Chavda's own family), three in Rajkot, and one each in Wankaner, in Morbi district, and in Anjar, in Kutch district. "The accused confessed to 12 murders during interrogation, and all deaths had occurred due to consumption of sodium nitrite," a police official told PTI. Verma said the poison was given dissolved in water during occult rituals.
The police account of the method came in pieces. Officers said Chavda bought sodium nitrite, which they described as a chemical used in dry cleaning, from a laboratory in Surendranagar. One officer told the Times of India he got it from an industrial unit. Police gave three different accounts of where he learned of it. PTI's police source said he heard about it from another tantrik in Surendranagar; police later told the Times of India that this man was no longer alive. A senior officer told the Times of India that he "knew from a famous crime series" that it could kill, and Aaj Tak quoted DCP Verma as saying he got the idea from watching the television series Crime Patrol. Police said they had found screenshots on his phone about the chemical's effects.
According to police, he mixed the powder into liquor for male followers and into food for women, and the liquor came from a bootlegger in Surendranagar. Officers said it took effect in 15 to 20 minutes and could bring on what looked like a heart attack. The Times of India's forensic reporting described the effect as starving the body of oxygen. Several of the dead were recorded at the time as having died of cardiac arrest, police said, and the cause of death in some of the other cases was still under investigation.
Police also said that in at least two of the cases, Chavda had his clients write notes before they died, telling them the notes were part of the ritual, and that the notes led officers to treat the deaths as suicides and file closure reports.
Police named or described all 12 people Chavda is said to have confessed to poisoning. What the press reported about them is set out here, with the dates and details police gave. None of these deaths was the subject of a trial, and the account of each one is the police account.
Chavda's grandmother was named by the Times of India as Mangu Vania; Aaj Tak gave her name as Manguben. Police said she died around 2010, 14 years before the arrest, which would make hers the earliest death in the count. An officer told the Times of India she was suffering from age-related illness and that Chavda gave her water with poison in it, telling her it was medicine, because he did not want to pay for her care. Her death was treated at the time as natural, and the family raised no question about it, police said.
Vivek Gohil was 23 and lived in Nikol, Ahmedabad. He was found dead near Kamod village, in the Aslali police area, on August 23, 2021. Police in December 2024 said Chavda had promised to quadruple his money through a ritual. His brother Jigar's suspicions are what led, by the police account, to the arrest. Little else about Vivek's life appears in the reports.
Dipesh Patadia was 50 and lived in Surendranagar. Aaj Tak described the family as a tailor's family. His wife was named Parul in two Times of India reports and Prafulla or Prafullaben in two others and in Aaj Tak; she was 50. Their daughter, Utsavi, was 19.
Their bodies were found in the Narmada canal near Dudhrej, outside Wadhwan, in March 2023; Aaj Tak gave the date as March 11, 2023. Local police registered the deaths as an accident, treating them as a suicide pact. Aaj Tak reported that a bottle, a one-rupee coin and two sets of keys were found near the bodies, that Chavda's phone was traced near the scene, and that Dipesh had been in repeated phone contact with him before the deaths. A senior Ahmedabad officer said the last call the family received had come from Chavda. Relatives pointed to him at the time, and the police questioned him, but no one was arrested and the case was left to sit.
In December 2024, police gave their version of what happened. Dipesh, they said, knew Chavda and had told him he disapproved of a relationship his daughter was in. Chavda told the parents Utsavi was possessed and that he could drive the spirit out. He also owed the family about 200,000 rupees, police said, and wanted to avoid paying it back. He brought the three of them to a quiet spot by the canal, gave them poisoned food during a ritual and pushed their bodies into the water, according to the police account. On December 5, 2024, Sarkhej police took Chavda to Wadhwan in connection with the case, and officers said it would be reopened.
The two most recent family deaths in the count were Chavda's uncle and his mother. Police said his uncle, Sura Chavda, fell ill in January 2024; Chavda paid for some treatment, and when the uncle's condition worsened, gave him a poisoned drink. His mother, Saroj Chavda, died about nine months before the arrest, around March 2024. Police said she had fallen ill and that she and her son quarreled often over household matters. DCP Verma said Chavda did not want to spend money on sick relatives and was "fed up" with the arguments with his mother. Family members had told police at the time that both died of cardiac arrest, and Surendranagar police did not investigate either death.
Nagma Mukasam was 32, according to the Times of India, and came from a Muslim family in Rajkot. Her parents and brother lived in the Bhagwati Para area of the city; another report gave her own address as Bhaktinagar. The police account of her death came out in stages after the custodial death and was set down in a complaint filed at Wankaner city police station.
According to that complaint, Chavda admitted to police that he had had a romantic relationship with Nagma. When she pressed him to marry her, police said, Chavda and Jigar Gohil gave her sodium nitrite at Chavda's home in Wadhwan on March 26, 2024, and she died. An earlier Times of India report, before the complaint was filed, had placed the death in June, but the complaint and the Rajkot rural police account both put it in the spring, before her family went looking for her. Police said her body was taken from Wadhwan to Dharmalpar, near Wankaner in Morbi district, and buried, with Chavda's wife Sonal, his nephew Shakti Raj Chavda and Gohil taking part.
On December 11, 2024, three days after Chavda's death, Sarkhej police went to Wankaner and exhumed remains near the Dharmalpar gate, with clothing. "Now, DNA tests will be conducted to confirm the victim's identity," Inspector Dhulia said. Samples were taken and the remains were kept in cold storage. Whether DNA testing confirmed the identity was not reported in the sources found. Her death had never been reported to police before Chavda's alleged confession, according to the Times of India.
Nagma's father, Kadar Mukasam, was a rickshaw driver; his age was given as 60 in one Times of India report and 62 in another. Her mother, Farida, was 58. Her brother, Asif, 35, was a daily-wage laborer. Rajkot rural police superintendent Himkar Singh said the family had "deep faith" in Chavda and went to him for help in March 2024, after Nagma disappeared.
Police said Chavda feared that if Kadar went to the police about his missing daughter, the investigation would lead to him. He took the three to a shrine in Jetpur for rituals, promising that Nagma would come back, that their money troubles would end and that Asif would find a wife. Afterward, police said, he took them to the Mota Rampar forest area near Paddhari, outside Rajkot, and gave them poison presented as a sacred offering. Their bodies were found in an autorickshaw. Aaj Tak gave the date as May 2, 2024; the Rajkot rural police account reported by the Times of India gave May 21. Paramedics from the 108 ambulance service pronounced them dead at the scene, according to Aaj Tak.
A note was found that said the family were asking God's forgiveness and had decided to end their lives because of money troubles and illness, and that no one else was involved. Police later said Chavda had arranged it, and the Times of India reported it came from Chotila. A separate Times of India report said police linked the family's deaths to a dispute over a loan of 300,000 rupees. Paddhari police registered the deaths as accidental and closed the file in October 2024.
The twelfth person in the count was described only as a priest whose death in Anjar, in Kutch district, had been regarded as suspicious. No name, date or detail about him appears in the sources found for this page.
At about 10 a.m. on Sunday, December 8, 2024, Chavda fell ill at the Sarkhej police station. He was taken by ambulance to the civil hospital at Sola, where, according to the PTI account, doctors declared him dead on arrival. He was 42. He had been in custody for five to seven days, depending on which arrest date is used.
The first explanation police gave was that he had complained of chest pain and uneasiness. The next day, a Sarkhej police officer gave a different account to the Times of India: Chavda had gone to the washroom at about 10 a.m., had a seizure and lost consciousness for a while, and was still alive when he was taken to Sola Civil Hospital, where he died. Gujarat Samachar reported that he vomited and collapsed. Inspector Dhulia said Chavda had no known illness, and an officer said he had no history of epilepsy or any neurological disorder. The Times of India noted that the shift from chest pain to seizure contradicted what senior officers had said first.
Because he died in custody, a judicial inquiry was reported as ordered, and a panel of doctors carried out the postmortem. Dhulia said the body was handed to the family on Monday, December 9. "We are conducting a transparent investigation into the circumstances of his death," DCP Verma said, according to the account on the site's earlier news page. "The postmortem report will guide further action." The sources found for this page do not report the postmortem findings or the result of any judicial inquiry.
On December 12, the Times of India placed Chavda's death alongside five other deaths in Gujarat police custody between 2022 and 2024 that police had attributed to seizures in people with no history of them. One of those families alleged torture; in another, the postmortem found injuries. A senior police official told the paper that attributing deaths to seizures could be "a pattern to protect officers involved in suspicious custodial deaths," and the paper said no officer had been charged in any of the cases. That report did not allege any wrongdoing in Chavda's case, and no source found for this page reports any finding about how he died.
Under Indian criminal procedure, a confession made to a police officer cannot be used as evidence against the person who made it; to be admissible, a confession generally has to be recorded before a magistrate. None of the reports says that any of Chavda's statements was recorded before a magistrate. His death ended any prosecution of him. The confession that police described to the press was therefore never put before a judge, never tested by cross-examination and never answered by a defense.
The physical evidence that police described was also untested. The reports mention a postmortem in Vivek Gohil's case that pointed to poisoning, a packet of powder sent for forensic testing, screenshots on a phone, phone location records in the Patadia case, a note in the Mukasam case and remains exhumed near Wankaner. The results of the forensic and DNA tests were not reported in the sources found, and no court weighed any of it. Police officials themselves noted the difficulty. "While an accused might confess to multiple crimes, gathering evidence, especially for older crimes, becomes incredibly difficult," a senior officer told the Times of India in a piece on such cases in Gujarat.
The case did not close when Chavda died. On December 11, Sarkhej police asked the Wadhwan and Paddhari police to reopen the Patadia and Mukasam cases and said they would seek permission to exhume Kadar and Farida Mukasam's bodies for DNA testing.
Within a week, Wankaner city police registered a murder case over Nagma Mukasam's death. It named Chavda, who was dead, and listed his wife, Sonal Chavda, Jigar Gohil, Shakti Raj Chavda and others as suspects. A case was also registered at Paddhari over the deaths of her parents and brother.
The most significant change concerned Jigar Gohil, who had been presented in the first reports as the brother who brought Chavda to justice. On December 19, Rajkot rural police superintendent Himkar Singh told reporters that Gohil was in Paddhari police custody, accused of helping Chavda in the four Mukasam deaths. DCP Verma said investigators had found evidence of Gohil's involvement in earlier deaths in Rajkot, Morbi and Surendranagar districts. "We found that Gohil was a co-accused not a whistleblower," Verma told the Times of India. "He feared that he would face legal action and hence, exposed Chavda."
Gohil, Sonal Chavda and Shakti Raj Chavda are accused, not convicted. The sources found for this page do not say whether any of them was formally charged, released on bail, tried or acquitted. Under the site's rule for undecided cases, they are described here only as accused, and what police said about them is the police account.
The case drew criticism of the police almost at once, much of it from police officials. On December 10, 2024, senior officers told the Times of India that the deaths could have been stopped if earlier complaints had been investigated properly. Sarkhej police said in a statement that closure reports had been filed in four of the 12 cases.
The examples were specific. In Vivek Gohil's case, Aslali police called his death a road accident and closed it even though, according to the Sarkhej statement, the postmortem had found sodium nitrite. In the Patadia case, Surendranagar police registered an accidental death, questioned Chavda, received relatives' suspicions about him, and did not arrest him or pursue the matter. In the Mukasam case, Paddhari police treated the three deaths as a suicide pact and closed the file in October 2024, about two months before the arrest. The three family deaths in Wadhwan were never investigated at all, because, police said, no one in the family raised a question.
The case also became part of a wider discussion in Gujarat. In a December 10 report, the Times of India's Parth Shastri put Chavda alongside other men accused of multiple killings in the state in the previous decade, and noted that none of them had been convicted of more than one. H. P. Sanghvi, director of the state's Directorate of Forensic Sciences in Gandhinagar, said forensic psychological profiling was becoming an important tool in such cases. The paper's profile of Chavda said several of the dead were his clients and that in at least two cases three people died together, which it attributed to financial motives.
Nothing in this case has been proved in court. The points below are where the sources disagree or where the record is thin.
The confession. All 12 deaths rest on what police said Chavda told them in custody, along with the police investigation that followed. Chavda died before he could be charged with any of them, and no court examined the confession, the circumstances in which it was given, or the evidence offered to support it.
The arrest date. Reports give December 1, December 2 and about 1 a.m. on December 3, 2024.
The chemical. Police, through PTI and most Times of India reports, named sodium nitrite. Two Times of India reports and Aaj Tak used "sodium nitrate," a different compound, and Gujarat Samachar used both. Police described the chemical as a dry-cleaning agent. The forensic result on the powder was not reported.
Where he learned of it. Police gave three accounts: another tantrik, a crime series, and the television program Crime Patrol.
The cause of his death. Police first said chest pain and then a seizure. The postmortem findings and the outcome of the judicial inquiry were not found.
Dates and names. Nagma Mukasam's death is placed in March (the Wankaner complaint) and June (an earlier report). The deaths of her parents and brother are placed on May 2 (Aaj Tak) and May 21 (Rajkot rural police via the Times of India). Mrs. Patadia is named as Parul and as Prafulla. One report says Surendranagar police registered the Patadia deaths in March 2024, which conflicts with the March 2023 date given everywhere else. Kadar Mukasam's age is given as 60 and 62.
Jigar Gohil's role. He was first described as a whistleblower and then, by the same police, as a co-accused. Neither version has been tested in court as of the latest source found.
The count. The 12 deaths as listed add up: one in Ahmedabad, six in Surendranagar district (his grandmother, uncle and mother, and the three Patadias), three in Rajkot district (Kadar, Farida and Asif Mukasam), one at Wankaner (Nagma Mukasam) and one in Anjar (the priest). The Anjar death is the least documented; no name or date was published in the sources found.
As of the December 20, 2024 Times of India report, the latest source found for this page, Navalsinh Chavda was dead and could not be prosecuted, and the investigations into the deaths police attributed to him were continuing. Murder cases had been registered at Wankaner and Paddhari, with Sonal Chavda, Shakti Raj Chavda and Jigar Gohil named as accused, and Gohil was in Paddhari police custody. The postmortem findings on Chavda, the judicial inquiry into his death, the forensic tests on the powder and the DNA tests on the remains found near Wankaner had not been reported. What has happened since then was not checked for this page.
About 1982: Navalsinh Chavda born, by the age given at his death; he grew up in Wadhwan, Surendranagar district.
About 2010: Death of his grandmother, Mangu Vania; police later said he confessed to poisoning her.
August 23, 2021: Vivek Gohil, 23, found dead near Kamod village, Aslali; case recorded as a road accident and later closed.
March 2023: Dipesh, Parul (or Prafulla) and Utsavi Patadia found dead in the canal near Dudhrej; registered as accidental deaths.
January 2024: His uncle, Sura Chavda, falls ill and later dies.
About March 2024: His mother, Saroj Chavda, dies.
March 26, 2024: Date given in the Wankaner complaint for the death of Nagma Mukasam, which was not reported to police at the time.
May 2024: Kadar, Farida and Asif Mukasam found dead in an autorickshaw near Mota Rampar, Paddhari; recorded as a suicide pact.
About May 2024: Chavda moves with his family to Vejalpur, Ahmedabad.
October 2024: Paddhari police close the Mukasam case.
December 1, 2024: Jigar Gohil goes to Sarkhej police; Chavda is detained at Mumatpura with Abhijeetsinh Rajput, who is unharmed.
December 1 to 3, 2024: Arrest recorded (reports differ); booked under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Gujarat's 2024 anti-black-magic law; remanded to police custody until December 10.
December 4 and 5, 2024: Police say he is suspected in four deaths; he is taken to Wadhwan over the Patadia case.
December 8, 2024: Police say he has confessed to 12 deaths. He collapses in custody at about 10 a.m. and dies at Sola Civil Hospital, aged 42.
December 9, 2024: Panel postmortem completed; body handed to his family.
December 11, 2024: Remains believed to be Nagma Mukasam's exhumed near Dharmalpar, Wankaner.
Mid-December 2024: Murder cases registered at Wankaner and Paddhari naming Chavda, Sonal Chavda, Shakti Raj Chavda and Jigar Gohil.
December 19, 2024: Rajkot rural police say Jigar Gohil is in custody as a co-accused.
After December 20, 2024: Not checked.