Mother, stepfather among 3 held for killing child, dumping body in drain

Police said the child’s mother was present when he was being thrashed by her second husband. The couple panicked after the boy fell unconscious and fearing that taking the boy to a hospital might land them in trouble, they decided to kill the child, police said.

Two days after a five-year-old boy’s body, stuffed in a sack, was recovered from a drain in northeast Delhi’s Khajoori Khas, the police have arrested his mother, stepfather, and a relative in connection with the murder.

Two days after a five-year-old boy’s body, stuffed in a sack, was recovered from a drain in northeast Delhi’s Khajoori Khas. (HT File Photo)

Police said the boy fell unconscious after being kicked in his private parts, allegedly by his stepfather, who was enraged over some family issue and was venting his anger on the child.

Police said the child’s mother was present when he was being thrashed by her second husband. The couple panicked after the boy fell unconscious and fearing that taking the boy to a hospital might land them in trouble, they decided to kill the child, police said.

“The couple decided to kill the child. While the boy’s mother gagged him using her hand, the stepfather strangled him to death. The couple then sought their relative’s help in disposing of the body. The trio stuffed the body in a sack and transported it to Khajoori Khas in a Maruti Eeco van and threw the sack into a drain there,” said the investigator.

Deputy commissioner of police (northeast) Ved Prakash Surya said that Thursday around 1pm, the Khajoori Khas police was informed about a boy’s body in a gunny bag lying in the drain. A case of murder and destruction of evidence was registered and teams were formed to identify the child and nab his killers.

DCP Surya said many CCTV cameras installed in the drain’s vicinity were scanned for clues. In the footage from one of the cameras, three persons, including a woman, were seen arriving there in an Eeco van and throwing a yellow sack into the drain around 3am on Thursday. However, the footage was of poor quality and their faces were not clear.

“We scanned more footage and noticed a unique sticker with a religious phrase written on it pasted on the front windscreen of the vehicle. More than 200 Eeco vans were examined during the probe. Our teams mapped a trail of that Eeco van by scanning CCTV camera footage and finally found it parked outside a house in Dayalpur area,” he said.

Police interrogated the van owner, Pradeep Sharma,27, and he confessed to his involvement in the crime. Sharma spilled the beans on his relative Dheeraj,22, and his second wife (name withheld by police). The couple lived in a rented room in the same locality but was missing.

Anticipating that the couple may try to flee to their home town in Uttar Pradesh’s Mainpuri, teams were sent to railway stations and bus terminals in Delhi-NCR. One of the teams caught the couple from near Anand Vihar bus terminal while they were about to board a bus to Mainpuri, the police said.

The couple’s interrogation, the DCP said, revealed that they met in 2017 and fell in love. The woman left her first husband and started living with Dheeraj house along with her three children. She allegedly sold one of her children for ₹45,000 to a childless couple in 2018, he said.

The couple was unable to meet their daily expenses, especially the children’s needs, with their meagre income. Dheeraj did not like his stepchildren and would often beat them up. One such thrashing claimed the five-year-old boy’s life, the officer said.