‘Our boy couldn’t even kill a rat’
Kin say cops made them believe the boy was a killer; his body was found in canal
KURUKSHETRA: The 18-year-old was the prime suspect in the rape-murder of a junior schoolmate but when his body was pulled out of a canal on Tuesday night, the family said he couldn’t have committed the crime.
“He couldn’t even kill a rat,” they said. The teenager was found dead a week after he and the 15-year-old girl went missing from Jhansa village in Haryana’s Kurukshetra.
The girl’s body was found on January 12 near a canal in neighbouring Jind district. She had been raped and the teenager was the main suspect.
“When police kept repeating he was the killer, we tried to convince ourselves that he could have behaved against his nature,” said his uncle.
But some family members didn’t lose faith and continued looking for him.
“When the girl’s body was found, we suspected he, too, could be killed,” said the uncle, adding police didn’t believe them. “But we searched for him along railway tracks and in the canal from where the girl’s body was found,” he said.
One of his cousins got to know on Tuesday night that a body had been found in a canal, 25km from Jhansa. “He checked a tattoo on the decomposed body and confirmed it was our boy,” the uncle said. A Class 12 student, he went to the same school as the girl, who was his two classes junior. Both came from the same village, were Dalits and even had same tuition teachers.
The boy’s father paints houses for a living. The girl’s is a tailor. “The boy was docile. He would hardly speak and attended my classes occasionally,” said Naresh Khurana, a school teacher who also gave them English tuitions. The girl, he said, was more regular.
“She was a shy person but she was sharp and bright.” The girl wanted to be a doctor and preferred books to play, her family had told HT.
“I saw them talk to each other but it never came across as if they were in a relationship,” Khurana said.
Kurukshetra SP Abhishek Garg said the two were in touch, a claim denied by the girl’s parents but supported by some of boy’s relatives. January 9 — when the two went missing — was the third day the girl had missed her tuitions, Khurana said. “My colleague Santosh had even called up her father to find out if all was well,” he said.
The father said she skipped classes on January 7 to spend the Sunday with him and the next day to attend a cousin’s birthday party. She would go to the tuition centre on her own but her mother would walk her back from the classes. When the mother found her missing at the centre that evening, police were alerted. The village was tense on Wednesday after the teenager’s body was handed over to his family for cremation. The anger stemmed from allegations that his relatives and friends, who were detained, were tortured by police, a charge they deny.