Boy, 17, stabbed to death by teenagers in school uniforms on Delhi bus
The victim apparently suspected the boys of stealing his mobile phone, and attempted to search them when they attacked him and stabbed him in the neck.
A 17-year-old first-year B.Com student was stabbed to death after a scuffle with five boys in school uniforms in a moving bus near Ashram in the heart of the national Capital. The boy, Zakir Nagar resident Mohammad Anas, succumbed to his injuries before he could be taken to hospital.
The incident took place on a government-run cluster bus on the Punjabi Bagh-Badarpur route at 3:30 pm on Thursday. The police apprehended four boys on Friday from Ali Vihar and Badarpur in south Delhi. They will be presented before the Juvenile Justice Board for further custody. A fifth boy involved in the crime is yet to be found, police said.
The suspects are all students of Classes 8 to 10 in two government schools near Ashram in south Delhi, according to Praveer Ranjan, joint commissioner of police (southern range).
The conductor of the bus, Jai Bhagwan, who was a witness to the crime, said there were at least 40 other passengers in the bus at the time of the murder, but no one intervened. “Everything happened quickly. Before I could react, they had stabbed the youth and jumped out of the bus,” he told Hindustan Times.
There were no identification documents found on Anas after the attack. While the police were struggling to identify him or the killers , Anas’s family members began going to police stations in the vicinity on Friday to find the missing boy. “When we reached New Friends Colony police station, we were shown the photo of the boy killed on the bus the previous day. It was our Anas,” the victim’s uncle, Mujeeb Ahmed, said.
The conductor said that the scuffle had broken out over Anas accusing the boys in school uniforms of stealing his mobile phone. The phone was found on Friday at the house of one of the suspects, police said, adding that the murder weapon -- a small knife that was used to slit Anas’s throat -- has also been recovered.
The victim, who would have turned 18 next February, was an undergraduate student at Al-Falah University in Faridabad. He lived with his parents and two siblings less than five kilometres from the scene of the crime.
Anas boarded the orange cluster bus at Ashram Chowk bus stop at around 3.15 pm. “A few hundred metres later, the bus was caught in a traffic jam on Mathura Road. Four or five boys entered in white shorts and navy blue pants,” Bhagwan said.
According to him, it was not long after that an argument broke out between Anas and the boys. “He accused them of stealing his mobile phone and tried to search their pockets. The boys resisted,” Bhagwan said.
The argument turned into a scuffle, and some of the boys allegedly restrained Anas while one of them stabbed him in the neck. “The boy who stabbed him seemed the oldest of the lot. He was egged on by his friends,” Bhagwan said.
He said the boys then jumped out of the slowly moving bus using the two doors at the opposite ends. The conductor called the police, who rushed Anas to Holy Family hospital, where he was declared brought dead.
The victim’s father, Bholu Khan, runs a drinking water business. “My Maruti Omni van had broken down in Maharani Bagh. I had called Anas to come with some money. He was a very well-behaved boy, but shouldn’t he have tried to retrieve his stolen phone?” Khan asked.
The Delhi government has deputed a civil defence volunteer in every bus, but the Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System (DIMTS), which operates cluster buses, confirmed on Friday that there was no volunteer on the bus.
Government figures show 56 juveniles in Delhi were involved in murder cases in the previous two years. Overall, 2,499 crimes in the city were committed by juveniles in 2016, according to police data.