New Delhi: Major Nikhil Rai Handa has confessed to murdering 35-year-old Shailza Dwivedi and claimed he killed her after she refused to continue an extramarital affair with him, sources in Delhi police said on Monday.

The officer also claimed that he had an affair with Shailza, the wife of a fellow major, for two years.

But the family of Shailza, who was a finalist at Mrs India Earth pageant of 2017, has said reports of the affair are "completely baseless".

"Handa told us that he had an affair with Shailza for two years after they first met in 2015 on Facebook. He was obsessed with her and wanted to marry her but was enraged because she had been snubbing his advances for some time. He told us that he wanted to take revenge by killing her for spurning him," a senior police officer said.

Investigators, he said, are verifying Handa's claims.

Handa was produced before a Delhi court which remanded him in police custody for four days.

Shailza's family accused Handa, a major in the Corps of Engineers, of stalking and harassing her for the past few months. Her brother, a lawyer in Amritsar, told reporters that the accused had mistaken his sister's "friendly nature" as a signal that she liked him. "My sister started ignoring him after he tried to force her into a relationship. Reports of my sister having an affair with him are completely baseless and false," he told mediapersons.

The police said their probe suggested that both got to know each other through Facebook in 2005 and later became friends. She had reportedly introduced him to her husband, Maj. Amit Dwivedi, in Dimapur where both the officers were posted at the time.

Shailza and Maj. Dwivedi got married in 2009 and they had been living in Nagaland for the past two years. The couple have a six-year-old son and Dwivedi was scheduled to leave for Sudan on a UN mission next month.

"Handa had become very obsessed with her and called her 3,000 times from his mobile phone in the past six months," said a police officer.

The police said Maj. Dwivedi had once seen Handa making a video call to his wife. "He had confronted him and warned him not to call his wife or go anywhere near her," the police officer said.

From Nagaland, Handa was being transferred to Jammu and Kashmir. Handa's wife and three children live in south Delhi.

On Saturday morning, the accused had called Shailza asking her to meet him. He picked her up at 10.30am in his Honda City car from the army base hospital in Delhi Cantonment. After some time, they had a heated argument, Handa whipped out a knife and allegedly slit her throat in a fit of rage. He then threw her out of the vehicle and ran his car over her face to make her death seem a road accident and fled the spot, the police said..

"There are bloodstains on vehicle's tyres. There were multiple knives in the car, including a Swiss knife, which was used in the murder," a police officer said.