Delhi: Neighbour rapes 7-year-old girl, murders her, dumps body in Usmanpur drain

The girl’s decomposed body was found inside a steel trunk dumped in a drain in northeast Delhi’s Usmanpur. The police on Friday arrested her neighbour, Ibral, kidnapped the girl and took her to his home where he raped her. Later, he smothered the minor to death.

The seven-year-old missing girl, whose decomposed body was found 10 days ago inside a steel trunk dumped in a drain in northeast Delhi’s Usmanpur, was raped before the murder, police said. The police on Friday claimed to have solved the kidnapping, rape and murder case with the arrest of the girl’s 25-year-old neighbour.

The accused in police custody. The man had kidnapped the minor girl and raped her. He smothered her to death and put his body in a steel trunk and threw it in a drain in Usmanpur. The girl’s decomposed body was found 10 days ago. (Handout Photo)

AK Singla, deputy commissioner of police (northeast), said the arrested man, Ibral, has disclosed that after kidnapping the girl, he took her to his home and raped her. When the girl started crying and told him that she will tell her parents about the sexual assault, he panicked and smothered her to death. “Ibral claims that he was drunk at the time of the crime,” said Singla.

Fearing that leaving the girl’s body in home will land him in jail, Ibral changed the girl’s clothes, wrapped the body in a blanket and put it inside a trunk, said police. “He spent the night at home with the girl’s body in the trunk,” said a senior investigating officer.

The next morning, around 5am, he dumped the trunk near the fifth pusta drain in Usmanpur, the officer said.

After two day, Ibral went to Loni in Ghaziabad where his mother and sister were staying. Unable to bear the guilt, Ibral told his mother about the crime he committed. His mother reprimanded him and asked him to leave home. She did not inform anybody in the family or the police about her son’s crime.

Ibral went underground and stayed at different hideouts in Delhi and Loni until he was arrested from there on Wednesday night, police said.

Pink kurta-salwar and blanket gave cops clues about the killer

The seven-year-old girl went missing on June 21 while she was playing outside her home in Gamri village near Shahdara. Despite efforts, neither the police nor her family members could locate her. On June 28, the police control room was informed about a trunk that was floating in a drain at Kartar Nagar area in Usmanpur. The caller claimed that a human leg was dangling out of the box. The trunk was opened and a girl’s highly decomposed body was found inside.

Teams of the northeast district police were clueless about the killer and the motive behind the murder when they began their probe. Except the clothes the girl was wearing and a blanket her body was wrapped in, there was nothing else in the box that could help investigators reach the killer.

“We focused our probe on the clothes and blanket. We showed them to the girl’s family who said that it did not belong to them. Also, their daughter was wearing a different set of clothes on the day she went missing,” said the investigator.

The police then launched a door-to-door drive and showed the clues to the neighbours. A woman in the neighbourhood claimed that the pink kurta-salwar belonged to Ibral’s sister. Cops reached Ibral’s home and found it locked. They then met his mother and questioned her during which she told everything her son had told her. “We conducted raids and caught Ibral. He confessed to the crime,” said the officer.

Ibral works as a construction worker. His wife left him six months ago and went to her native home in Bihar.