Convicted serial killer who jumped parole found to be living in Delhi

New Delhi:

A 62-year-old convicted serial killer who had jumped parole after being released for 20 days from a jail in Jaipur was found to have remarried and living in west Delhi’s Baprola village, Delhi Police said on Wednesday after arresting the man.

Devender Sharma, a doctor, had allegedly murdered about 50 taxi and truck drivers in the 1990s and early 2000s but was convicted in about a dozen kidnapping-cum-murder cases, Rakesh Paweriya, deputy commissioner of police (crime branch), said.

Sharma was serving a life sentence in the Jaipur Central Jail for the last 16 years when he decided to jump a 20-day parole in January this year.

The officer said Sharma had studied medicine in Bihar and had run a clinic in Jaipur for 11 years, even as he slowly entered the world of crime, including running a kidney racket, operating a fake gas agency, and then going on to murder a host of drivers and dumping their bodies in a canal infested with crocodiles in Uttar Pradesh.

“His criminal career began in 1994 when he lost about Rs11 lakh after investing in a fake gas agency. To recover his losses, Sharma too began a fake gas agency with some partners. They would murder drivers of trucks carrying gas cylinders. The gas cylinders would be unloaded in his agency and sold to customers,” the DCP said.

The alleged fraud was busted in 1996 and Sharma was arrested. After his release on bail, he allegedly went on to start another fake gas agency and then got involved in a kidney racket.

“The kidney racket was operating out of Jaipur, Gurgaon and Ballabhagarh. He has told us he had arranged 125 illegal kidney transplants and received Rs5-7 lakh in each case. He was finally arrested in 2004 when the infamous Gurgaon kidney racket was exposed, a case that saw many doctors get arrested as well,” Paweriya said.

Alongside, Sharma was also allegedly bumping off taxi drivers and selling their vehicles in the grey market, the DCP said. “He would hire a taxi from Jaipur to Aligarh, kill the driver in between and dump his body in a canal in UP’s Kasganj. The canal was infested with crocodiles and the retrieval of the bodies was difficult,” the DCP said.

The officer said Sharma was allegedly involved in about 50 such killings but was booked in fewer cases and convicted in half-a-dozen of them. These murder cases were registered in Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, the officer said.

“When he got parole, he decided never to return to jail. He first lived in Aligarh before moving to Uttam Nagar in West Delhi. It was during this time that he befriended a widowed woman and married her,” the officer said.

Sharma’s first wife and children had deserted him after getting to know about his alleged murders, the officer said.

In Delhi, Sharma had taken to property dealings and told the police that he was mediating the sale of a building in Connaught Place. The police are yet to ascertain that.

The narcotics cell of Delhi Police’s crime branch arrested Sharma from his rented house in Baprola village on Monday after receiving a tip-off about his location.