Couple kills 2-year-old boy out of hatred, arrested

Investigators said Yamuna and Rajesh kidnapped the boy on Friday when he was playing on a footpath, assaulted him and then drowned him in a drain in Punjabi Bagh.

A couple arrested for kidnapping and murdering a two-year-old boy in west Delhi’s Rajouri Garden area were planning the crime for over an year, the police said on Sunday after arresting them. They said the couple was allegedly jealous of the boy since the family members loved him more than their six-year-old daughter.

The boy’s body was found in the drain in Saturday.

Investigators said Yamuna and Rajesh kidnapped the boy on Friday when he was playing on a footpath, assaulted him and then drowned him in a drain in Punjabi Bagh. The accused and the victim’s families are unemployed and sleep on the footpath near a flyover in the area.

The boy’s body was found in the drain in Saturday.

Incidentally, nobody reported the matter to the police. Urvija Goel, DCP (West) said that no PCR call was made in this case, and the incident came to light when a police patrol team spotted a woman crying on the footpath. When they asked her grievance, she told them that her son has gone missing, the DCP said.

Goel said footage from more than a dozen CCTV cameras from around the spot from where the family lived was scanned. The footage showed a couple taking the boy towards Punjabi Bagh.

An investigator said the couple was identified from the footage, and they were arrested from a slum cluster in Raghubir Nagar. He said the couple has confessed to their crime.

After coming to know that the accused have drowned the boy in the drain, rescue operations were immediately launched to find him. Since it rained heavily on Saturday, the drain was flooded. A second investigator said that more than 100 people that included flood department workers, police officials and local residents looked for the body of the boy. It was fished out after hours of search.

The second investigator said during further probe to make a watertight case against the accused couple, the police questioned more than 30 ragpickers who are active around that particular stretch of the footpath. One of them, who identified herself by her first name, Ismi, recognised the couple from their photograph. She told the police that she saw them picking up the boy from the footpath on Friday.

Ismi’s statement has been recorded before a magistrate, the investigator said.

A senior official said that a day after their arrest, more than 30 rag pickers were questioned, and one eye-witness of the incident was identified. A woman named Ismi gave her statement in the court today and identified the couple as the ones she had seen picking up the boy while he was asleep and running away.

Quoting what Yamuna told the police during interrogation, the first investigator said that ever since the boy was born, he was given the maximum attention by his grandmother, Geeta. Yamuna felt that Geeta had started ignoring her daughter ever since the boy’s birth.

Yamuna wanted to eliminate the child and kept planning. However, her first husband’s death delayed her plans. She got married to Rajesh two years ago, and the two were looking for an opportunity to get rid of the child, the police said.

Police said that the couple’s daughter has been left with Rajesh’s family as of now.

A case under sections 363 (punishment for kidnapping), 364 (Kidnapping or abducting in order to murder), 302 (punishment for murder), 34 (Acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) and 120 (B) (punishment for criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) has been registered at the Rajouri Garden police station.