FIVE MURDERS AND AS UICIDE
A young man goes on a killing spree, before he shoots himself in the head in Delhi’s urban sprawl
At around 9 a. m. on September 3, Ravi Singh, 25, stepped out of his cousin Naveen’s rented room on the second floor of a building in Sanjay Enclave, Bindapur. He was not going to work. A katta or crude, locally made pistol and a locally made semi- automatic pistol were tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He carried a spare clip with 10 bullets in his pocket. He had shot Naveen the previous evening and stuffed his body into a box bed in the tiny, 200 sq ft room. This time, it was the turn of Naveen’s wife, Renu. He shot her after a heated argument that morning, because she refused to elope with him.
Sheela Garg, 53, a matronly landlady with a nose for property deals, heard the argument and the gunshot. She rushed up the steep, marble- tiled stairs and confronted Ravi. There was a heated exchange of words and a scuffle. Ravi aimed his semi- automatic pistol at her and shot her three times. She screamed and toppled forward, blood pouring out of her torso. Her son, Dinesh, a property agent, dashed into the building after hearing the commotion, but quickly shrank into a corner: He saw Ravi walk down the stairs with pistols in both his hands, movie style. “Get back,” Ravi yelled at him, “or I will kill you as well.”
Ravi then walked to his car, a Santro, parked across the street, and drove away. Over a hundred residents had gathered outside the building in the densely packed, recently regularised colony. Nobody stopped him. A frightened cigarette vendor peeped over the top of some sweet jars and snapped Ravi’s registration number on his cellphone. If Ravi had melted into Delhi’s rush hour traffic, it would have been just another crime of passion, destined to hit the headlines and then gather dust in police files. But the story didn’t end here. Ravi drove westwards towards Ghaziabad, over 90 km away, where Delhi’s matchbox apartment blocks push into eastern Uttar Pradesh’s verdant fields.
Somewhere along the way, Ravi abandoned his vehicle and borrowed a friend’s red Bajaj Pulsar motorcycle, and
RAVI’S DIZZYING US- STYLE SHOOTING SPREE HAS SHOCKED THE POLICE FOR ITS SHEER FEROCITYAND UNWAVERING RESOLVE.
a helmet. He then hurtled at top speed, streaking through dense traffic and past the sugarcane fields of Issapur village. It was around 2 p. m. Ravi stopped at a large house on the edge of the village and parked the motorcycle. It was the home of Renu’s farmer father, Harinder Singh Malik, 50. Two years ago, Malik’s only son, Arun, a 22- year- old home guard, had swallowed poison because of “dishonour to the family” when Renu, then a college student, had eloped with
Naveen, a driver at a call centre.
Ravi didn’t take his helmet off as he whipped out his two pistols. As Malik walked out of his home, there were no exchange of words. Ravi levelled the pistol and blew the farmer’s brains out. Ritu, 17, Renu’s sister, rushed out. Ravi calmly aimed the weapon at her chest and fired once. She fell down, writhing, on the brick- paved courtyard. Ravi walked past their bodies and ran upstairs. He bolted the door from inside, took off his helmet, pointed the pistol at his forehead and pulled the trigger.
In less than half an hour, the house had been surrounded by irate villagers and a posse of policemen armed with rusted .303 rifles. They fired two wary shots at the locked door; villagers broke the tiled roof and tossed in burning fireballs to smoke him out. When the door was finally broken down, Ravi’s body lay in a pool of blood.
With 543 murder cases last year, Delhi is India’s murder capital. Sensational murders are not uncommon: In 1995, an MLA, Sushil Sharma, incinerated his wife Naina Sahni’s body in a tandoor; in 2006, businessman Moninder Singh Pandher and his servant Surender Koli allegedly murdered and dismembered a dozen underage girls from a slum colony near Noida.
However, Ravi’s dizzying US- style shooting spree has shocked the police for its sheer cold- blooded ferocity and unwavering resolve. “I can’t understand this,” says an officer investigating the case in Uttam Nagar. “Even hardened criminals pause and hide. But this boy was relentless,” he says.
Police are struggling to establish a motive. What they have discovered so far, they say, is a story of lust, jealousy and extreme rage. There are conflicting versions: One says Ravi was in love with both Renu and Ritu. Another, that he only wanted to marry Ritu. The case isn’t helped by the fact that all the protagonists are dead. Local residents say the police are covering up their ineptitude. “The police found Naveen’s body in the bed only a day after, despite the foul smell,” says the owner of a chemist shop in Bindapur, Delhi.
Sub- inspector Sanjeeb Kumar Shukla of Bhojpur police station, Ghaziabad, calls Ravi’s rampage a junoon ( madness), a word the police often use to describe an overwhelming number of Delhi’s murders: Almost 98 per cent of victims in Delhi are murdered by people they know; every fifth murder is sexually motivated.
Was it the cause of the temporary bout of madness that led the school dropout to execute his victims from close range? Four of his five victims were killed with a steady hand. Ravi did not waver or miss even once. Unusual for someone who did not have a police record, and was not known to have handled firearms. No one knows where Ravi bought the weapons: The katta costs Rs 1,500; a semi- automatic pistol can cost upto Rs 50,000. His personal life, through a series of odd jobs, is ordinary to the point of banality, except for one poignant fact: Both his parents, who claimed the body from the police in Issapur village, are blind.