The woman colleague accompanying an Apple executive who was shot dead in his car by a cop around 2am on Saturday has said the SUV travelled a further 10 metres after the shooting and hit a traffic divider.

However, the police statement of arrested constable Prashant Chaudhary claims that victim Vivek Tiwari drove the car a further 400 metres after being shot, eventually ramming it into the divider, police sources said.

A doctor at the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, who had attended on the dying Vivek, said no one could drive a car more than five metres after receiving a bullet in the upper chest.

A driver has to negotiate two sharp turns between the Makhdumpur police outpost, where Chaudhary allegedly claims Vivek was shot, and the divider — so it cannot be argued that the car had hurtled along on its own momentum.

It remains unclear what the motive behind the purported embellishment can have been.

Vivek’s grief-stricken wife Kalpana suggested that some cops may have driven and crashed the car in a desperate, heat-of-the-moment scheme to pass the death off as a road accident.

However, the existence of a bullet wound and an eyewitness — the woman colleague — would make it unlikely for any cop to entertain such a hare-brained scheme even for a moment, police sources said.

Chaudhary claims the car was stationary when he and a colleague caught Vivek and the woman colleague in an intimate position inside, and that the shooting took place when Vivek started the car and tried to knock them down.

If that is what happened, the car couldn’t have gathered enough speed within 10 metres to have suffered the sort of damage in the collision that it did — as evident from a picture this newspaper carried on Sunday morning. A 400-metre drive after the shooting would take care of the lacuna.

The woman colleague had said on Saturday the car was travelling when the two constables “intercepted us as if we were criminals and shouted at us to step out”.

“While we were trying to figure out what offence we had committed,” she said, “the car touched their motorcycle. One of them then fired from a pistol.”

Vivek’s family views the “intimate position” charge as slander. Kalpana has stressed that Vivek, 40, had called her from office around 1.30am saying he would be back soon after dropping the woman colleague, working late with him, at her home.

Kalpana says the police’s behaviour through Saturday — not letting her know about the shooting and preventing her visiting the site — suggested efforts at some sort of dilution of the crime.

Senior superintendent of police Kalanidi Naithani has said the force didn’t know her number. “My husband’s iPhone was in the car and it was ringing continuously,” Kalpana said.

“The policemen didn’t take my call. I got a call from the hospital only at 3am, saying my husband had been admitted with minor injuries. After reaching the hospital (around 4am), I found he had a bullet injury. He was declared dead an hour later. I requested the police to take me to the incident site but they kept ignoring me till 6pm.”

Kalpana later spoke to chief minister Yogi Adityanath over the cellphone of deputy chief minister Dinesh Sharma, who had visited the Tiwari home. She told Adityanath she wanted to meet him. “I know the family and am here in my individual capacity as well as that of deputy CM,” Sharma said.