“We are very confident of working out the case. There is sufficient motive behind Soumya’s death,” Dhaliwal told Newsline. He, however, did not disclose if they were working on any new line. The angles they were probing earlier were road rage, attempted robbery and personal enmity. “Dedicated teams of officers from various units of the South district police are continuously working on the case,” the DCP said.

According to the police, the bullet recovered from Soumya’s body would not help much in the investigation as it was fired from a .312 bore country-made pistol, which is easily available with criminals.

On giving clean chit to Mudit Jain, owner of a BMW car — broken parts of which were found at the crime spot — Dhaliwal said: “After picking up all the plastic pieces on the one-km stretch of the Nelson Mandela Marg, the crime scene was reconstructed. Later, we called in experts to show them a rearview mirror and ask which car it might belong to. They identified it as a BMW piece. We did all verifications and carried out a mock drill near the murder spot to check the radical span of the car and its velocity impact, and to see how fast it can drive through the bushes.”

Dhaliwal said they carried out all scientific measures to verify Jain’s involvement in

the crime. “The BMW occupant was found to be innocent,” he added.

Police sources said according to the circumstances and what those known to Soumya had to say, the possibility of a personal enmity as a motive behind the murder appeared bleak, though they were not ruling out this angle altogether. The police said local criminals and bad elements were under continuous watch. Though no deadline has been set to solve the case, the South district police claimed to have put its best men on the job.

The sources said all forensic reports were likely to be out latest by Monday.

The police are pinning hopes on the forensic details to crack the case.

A journalist with Headlines Today, 25-year-old Soumya was killed on the Nelson Mandela Marg in Vasant Kunj when she was driving back home in the early hours of September 30. The police had initially received a call about an accident and found Soumya’s car smashed against the central verge of the road. A postmortem at AIIMS, however, found a bullet in her right skull. The police had said she was shot from a close range.