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Hathras schoolboy murder: Dreams of child’s better future shattered, father seeks SIT probe, bulldozer action
A father demands justice after his 11-year-old son was murdered in Hathras, seeking a special investigation and harsh penalties for the school.
: Agony and anger were palpable as a software professional’s dreams of his child’s better future lay shattered at the hands of cruel killers of his 11-year-old son in Hathras.
The murdered schoolboy’s father, Sri Krishna Kushwaha, working with a private firm in Noida, had put his son in the DL Public School with plans to keep him there till class 5 in the hope that he will get a good educational foundation.
Subsequently, he would have got him admitted to a better school probably in the city. Speaking to HT, Kushwaha said that he had been working as a software professional for more than a decade. During the Covid period, he had first shifted his wife and children back to their native village in Hathras. His son had then got admission in lower kindergarten in the same school.
For the first year, he was a day scholar but from upper kindergarten, he was accommodated in the hostel. On why he chose to keep his wife and children away from himself, he said that he found it better and financially more suitable to have them stay back at the village. He used to come from Noida over the weekends, Kushwaha explained.
With his son’s life snuffed out, Kushwaha demanded a Special Investigation Team probe into the case, bulldozer action and public hanging of the culprits.
“We are least satisfied by the working out of the case because we believe that there were others involved too. A Special Investigation Team should be created for proper investigation. My only son was so brutally attacked that his collar bone was broken. The school authorities say that CCTV camera was non functional on the day of the incident and no footage is being provided to us,” said Kushwaha.
“Bulldozer action should be taken against such schools and the school authorities responsible should be publicly hanged,” he said.
Recalling the events of the fateful day, Kushwaha said he was set to leave his village (Tursen) in the Sahpau region of Hathras to join duty on September 23 when he received a call from the school manager Dinesh Lal Baghel that his son had fever.
“The school was six kilometres from my village. I asked him drop my son home so that I could get him treated. What was the logic in the school manager insisting that he will get the boy treated on his own? He later said the boy’s condition was deteriorating and thus he was being taken to Agra,” Kushwaha added.
“We desperately followed the school manager, who was intercepted in Sadabad, and there lay my son’s body along with his school bag. Why would one carry a school bag for an ailing student?” asked Kushwaha.
He said he had no idea about the school management indulging in occult practices and had also got his daughter, younger than his son, admitted to the school this year. She did not stay at the hostel but went to the school in Rasgawan village from her Tursen village home in a cab with a few other girls, he said.
For both children, the father was paying annual fees of ₹1 lakh, he said. The DL Public School, is now closed after orders from the education department in Hathras, which is probing how a school with permission to run classes till the fifth standard was operating up to Class 8 with a hostel.
The hostel had a strength of 35 students and there were 24 students there on the day of the incident, people familiar with the matter said. The two-storeyed school building had about 20 rooms where about 700 to 800 students studied.
