Delhi blueline murder: Bus driver who killed schoolboy in 2010 arrested

To evade arrest, the 51-year-old man, Bharat Lal, the driver of the Blueline bus back in 2010, was working as a private driver, and now went by the name Bharat Raut, said police.

More than a decade after a 17-year-old Class 12 student of a government school in the Capital was beaten to death in a bus of the now-scrapped Blueline service by its driver, conductor, and cleaner, the crime branch of the Delhi Police has arrested one of the accused from Sheohar district in Bihar, where he was living under an assumed name with new identification documents.

Bus driver who killed schoolboy in 2010 arrested (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

To evade arrest, the 51-year-old man, Bharat Lal, the driver of the Blueline bus back in 2010, was working as a private driver, and now went by the name Bharat Raut, said police.

Lal was 39 when he, along with bus conductor Mohammad Danish (age not known and said to have died in 2011) and a cleaner whose name has been withheld by the police since he is still absconding, allegedly assaulted the schoolboy, Chandan alias Rahul, inside the bus after he refused to buy a ticket while returning home to Harkesh Nagar (near Okhla). The incident took place on August 27, 2010.

After the teenager died, the three panicked. They took his body to the Nizamuddin area in the bus, and put it along the railway tracks, in a bid to pass it off as a train accident, said police.

Chandan’s body, with multiple injury marks, was found on the tracks near Nizamuddin railway station the same evening. Meanwhile, his mother, Indu Devi, had filed a missing complaint with the Kalkaji police. When the body was shown to Devi, she identified the deceased as her son, said special commissioner of police (crime) Ravindra Singh Yadav.

Initially, the police initiated an inquest proceeding, considering it a case of accidental death involving a train. However, Chandan’s family moved court, claiming that his mother had received a call on the evening of August 27, 2010, from a bus conductor who identified himself as Mohammad Danish and claimed that her son’s school bag was with him, and that she should collect it.

“The family called back on that mobile number, but it was turned off. Considering that Chandan’s autopsy confirmed that his injuries were caused before his death, the court ordered the Delhi Police to register a first information report (FIR). A case of kidnapping and murder with common intention was registered on November 11 that year under the Indian Penal Code’s (IPC) sections 363, 365, 302 and 34,” a second officer aware of the case said.

During the investigation, the Kalkaji police, through manual intelligence, learnt that Chandan was last seen boarding a Blueline bus on route number 425 in the Nehru Place area. The investigating team collected details of the mobile number from which Chandan’s mother received the call. It belonged to Danish, the conductor of the bus. As the pieces started falling in place, it was found that Chandan was allegedly assaulted inside the bus by Danish, the bus’s driver, and the cleaner, said a third police officer aware of the case.

“All three lived in rented accommodations in different parts of south Delhi. They were found missing since the day of the crime. Despite multiple raids at their possible hideouts in Delhi, Haryana and Bihar, they could not be caught. In 2014, the case was transferred to the southeast’s district investigation unit (DIU). It was later learnt that Danish died in 2011. The driver and cleaner were declared proclaimed offenders (POs) in the case and a ₹50,000 reward was announced against each for their arrest,” added the third officer.

The breakthrough, after the case lying in the cold storage of nearly a decade, came last month.

The crime branch team, led by sub-inspector Pankaj Baliyan took up the case – the unit routinely picks up unsolved cases from the police files and tries to see if fresh headway can be made – and began collecting details about the absconding suspects. The team found that the IDs that the driver had submitted while taking a rented accommodation in south Delhi showed that he was Bharat Lal, son of D Rawat.

“The surname Rawat made the investigators believe that the driver could be from Uttarakhand. We collected details about him from multiple sources -- spoke to people he knew, and those living in the places in his neighbourhood in Delhi. Eventually, we learnt from the information we gathered that he may have moved to Haryana soon after the crime, and from there to Bihar’s Sheohar district around seven years ago,” said a crime branch officer who was part of the raiding team.

“We found that this person now lived in a location in Ward No 10, Nagar Panchayat, Sheohar. There are about 2,000 houses in that area, and we started talking to locals, asking if someone called Bharat may have moved there in the last seven years. After four days, we zeroed in on the suspect -- who worked as a private driver.”

To nab him, on Wednesday, the team mingled with people near his lane in plain clothes. “As he was coming home in the afternoon, we confronted him, and told him that he was being arrested for the 2010 kidnapping and murder,” the officer added. “He was astonished, but ended up confessing to the crime.”

Police are now looking for the absconding bus cleaner and verifying the information about Danish’s death.

HT was unable to contact Chandan’s mother for a reaction on Thursday.