The Desi Crime Podcast

July 20, 2009. In a Mumbai courtroom, a trial has been under way for months. But before today's witness can begin, the accused has a request. He asks the judge to let him address the court and admit his guilt. The accused is Ajmal Kasab, the only one of the ten Mumbai attackers to have been captured alive. A gasp ripples through the room. Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam objects, but the judge lets Kas...

On the 26th of February 2011, a young woman’s phone rang somewhere in England, and the voice on the other end said something this woman would repeat, almost word for word, to a friend minutes later, because it frightened her so badly. The caller said he was ready to go to jail for her for twenty-one years. He did not say what for. By then, a car had already been set ablaze and a twenty-one-year-ol...

In February 2012, American interior designer Wendy Albano flew halfway across the world to Bangkok. Days later, a hotel employee entered her luxury suite and found the 52-year-old dead on the bathroom floor, strangled and stabbed repeatedly. There was no obvious sign of who could have wanted Wendy dead. But the hotel’s CCTV held one crucial clue: Wendy hadn’t arrived in Bangkok alone. For days, ca...

In June 1974, at Royal Ascot, a horse called King Levanstell completed the race ahead of the Queen's own runner. Standing in the winner's enclosure was a thirty-five-year-old Hindu man from a village in southern Trinidad, who had arrived in London fourteen years earlier with nothing and drove a lorry for a living. By then he owned a hundred racehorses and had gone through twenty-four Rolls-Royces....

Every year on August 15, Bangladesh remembers a family destroyed inside its own home. In 1975, soldiers entered a residence in Dhaka and assassinated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, along with most of his family. Decades later, the date was observed across the country as the National Day of Mourning. But on August 15, 2013, as Bangladesh remembered the violence of the past, another home in Dhaka was becomi...

Indē Wild Discount: Use code WILD5 on the website for 5% off your order + 29% off already on the webside! Visit Indē Wild at: https://sl1nk.com/nvxg73w On a Friday morning in July 2018, a woman parked her Mercedes on a street in one of the safest neighbourhoods in Virginia. Her grown daughter was in the passenger seat. She got out to put money in the parking meter, which took her perhaps forty sec...

In 1951, one of the most famous men in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, was a batsman. Some of the greatest players in the world believed he was a genius. Frank Worrell said that if he were choosing a dream team made up of the best cricketers on the planet, he would be the first person he picked. Garry Sobers called him the greatest batsman who had ever lived. And was not just admired for how well he played...

On the night of the 29th of November 2012, in the same California county, two men ended up flat on their backs about ten miles apart. One of them was 66 years old, from a small town in Punjab. He got into IIT Delhi, then got on a plane to America in 1970 and built success. That night he was lying on the floor of his own seven thousand square foot mansion, in one of the safest towns in the United S...

It's the 18th of August, 2007. A Saturday. And in a flat in Lokhandwala, in Andheri, a 16-year-old boy is sitting at a computer, doing what every teenager in India is doing that year. He's on Orkut. And in this boy's messages, tonight, like most nights for the past 3 weeks, is a girl. Her name is Angel. Angel is flirty. Angel is funny. Angel keeps saying they should meet. And the boy is interested...

Welcome to Chai & Chithi, a segment where we read some of the scariest, most terrifying, and most haunting stories that YOU send in to us. In this week’s episode, we’re reading: To send us your scary stories to read, write to us at staydesi [at] thedesistudios [dot] com. For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/thedesistudios or join our YouTube f...

By the mid-1990s, Vancouver’s Indo-Canadian underworld was no longer operating quietly. Young gangsters were threatening each other on television. Brothers were being shot in traffic and left dead in alleyways. Their names were becoming larger than the crimes attached to them, turning into a strange mixture of warning, legend and aspiration. But one of the most extraordinary stories from that worl...

A child of ten. Approximately one hundred injuries. A two-bedroom flat in Surrey. A flight to Pakistan. A handwritten note left next to her body. And a system that had been watching her household for over a decade. This is the story of a case that horrified the UK and beyond-- a case of bruises, broken trust, unanswered warnings, and a little girl who had been failed by the very people meant to pr...

In July 2020, inside a luxury apartment building in Manhattan, a young tech entrepreneur vanished behind the doors of his own home. His name was Fahim Saleh. At just 33 years old, he had already built companies across continents, becoming known as an ambitious founder with roots in Bangladesh and a reputation for seeing opportunity where others saw risk. To the outside world, he was successful, dr...

In September 2003, three young Singaporean students were sharing an ordinary apartment in Sydney. They were far from home, studying in Australia, living the kind of life that many international students know well. But one morning, inside their apartment, everything changed. Two of them would never make it out alive. At first, the case seemed to point outward-- to strange sightings and possible int...

In a quiet neighbourhood in The Hague, a woman disappeared without warning. Her name was Sharmila Shinde. She was a wife, a mother, and an Indian woman living thousands of kilometres away from home, until she was nowhere to be seen. When investigators entered her home, what they found inside would turn this disappearance into one of the most chilling cases connected to the Indian community in the...

A boy from a big Pune business family, a girl about to marry into it, and a wedding being built on a scale that barely sounded real. Then Ketan Agarwal went over the edge of Lohagad Fort near Lonavala, and for 5 days it stayed exactly what it looked like: a tragic trekking accident. But his fiancée Siya Goyal, a man in a hoodie named Chetan Chaudhary, 2004 phone calls, and a string of earlier atte...

For years, men were disappearing from Toronto’s Gay Village. Some were immigrants. Some were refugees. Some were South Asian or Middle Eastern men living complicated, private lives in a city that was supposed to offer them freedom. They moved through bars, dating apps, friendships, and chosen families — until, one by one, they seemed to vanish. At first, there were rumours. Then there was fear. Pe...

A secret affair. A blackmail threat. And a mother-daughter duo willing to do the unthinkable to keep it all hidden. In this episode of Desi Crime, we unravel the shocking case of TikTok influencer Mahek Bukhari and her mother, Ansreen Bukhari, who were convicted of orchestrating the deaths of 21-year-olds Saqib Hussain and Mohammed Hashim Ijazuddin after a relationship threatened to become public....

Watch Brown on Zee5 TODAY!https://www.zee5.com/web-series/details/brown/0-6-4z5968730 For a village in the suburbs of Ernakulam, the morning of October 3rd, 2006 arrived with a smell of kerosene and a scene so brutal that the whole country would soon be talking about it. In the weeks that followed, a name would surface. A name that became folklore, the kind of name parents used to frighten childre...

Welcome to Chai & Chithi, a segment where we read some of the scariest, most terrifying, and most haunting stories that YOU send in to us. In this week’s episode, we’re reading: To send us your scary stories to read, write to us at staydesi [at] thedesistudios [dot] com. For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/thedesistudios or join our YouTube f...

On April 13, 2026, somewhere in Tampa, Florida, a 26 year old American man typed a question into ChatGPT. What happens if a human has put a black garbage bag and thrown in a dumpster. The chatbot told him it sounded dangerous. He typed back. How would they find out. Three days later, two Bangladeshi doctoral students at the University of South Florida — two young people who were quietly planning t...

In 2016, a man who was equal parts survivalist and seeker, a man who traded a six-figure tech career for a life in the wilderness, a man who was phenomenal at surviving in nature, disappeared in it forever. This is the story of that man. But this is also the story of the Parvati Valley—a sliver of the Indian Himalayas so staggeringly beautiful and so consistently deadly that the list of people who...

On October 28, 2023, the world woke up to the news that one of the most beloved sitcom actors in television history was found face-down in his hot tub. Matthew Perry. Chandler Bing. 54 years old. The initial assumption was simple: a troubled man, a long battle with addiction, a tragic but unsurprising end. But the investigation that followed pulled at a thread that unraveled something far bigger t...

In a small village in Tamil Nadu, three people walked into a house in 2008 and were never seen again. No missing persons report was ever filed. No investigation was ever launched. For four years, the world moved on and a family ate dinner every night literally above the truth of those 3 missing people. What finally brought it to the surface wasn't a detective or a tip or a breakthrough in forensic...

We first covered the brutal custodial killings of Jayaraj and Bennix in 2020, and then again as an update in 2022. In light of the recent updates on the case that have shaken the country, this episode is a compilation of all Desi Crime episodes on the story, followed by a segment on what we know now as of April 2026. For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patre...