‘Scratches on hands’ led cops to senior citizen’s murderer
NEW DELHI: It took Delhi Police eight days and questioning of 277 people before zeroing in on the real suspect, a plumber, in the brutal murder of a 67-year-old woman in South Delhi's Gulmohar Enclave. The woman, Usha Kumar, was found brutally murdered with throat slit and injury marks on her head on April 23.
Moreover, the accused did not run away from the DDA flats and instead dared to face police and give them a parallel theory to work on. The police was almost misguided with his version before an investigator grew suspicious of scratches on his hands which appeared fresh. The inquisitive cops then confronted the accused, Sunny Thakur, on the scratches on his hands, to which he failed to provide a satisfactory answer. The cops knew they got their man and arrested him.
Police said that accused Sunny Thakur was quite familiar with the residents and since he had been working for 15 years in the same compound, people trusted him. “The trust was so much that even when someone went for a vacation, they handed over their house keys to Sunny. He was the last one we could suspect as even after the robbery and murder he did not run away instead reported to duty,” said DCP South Romil Baaniya.
By the time the police teams were questioning hawkers, scrap dealers, newspaper vendors in the locality, a team worked on the CCTV footage which found Sunny carrying a bag with him on the day of the incident. “Sunny told us that he got scratches on hands while working at the pipe in the DDA Flats. Our team then observed the pipe and ruled out any possibility of the pipe bruising the plumber. Further information about him revealed that he was a drug addict,” said Vijayanta Arya, Additional DCP South.
Cops said that on April 23, he found the house door of the senior citizen Usha Kumar opened and he sneaked in. Under the influence of drugs, he attacked her with a dumbbell, tried to smother her with a pillow and strangulate her with a rope. When the woman provided stiff resistance, he slit her throat with a knife. He robbed her of the jewellery as he needed gold jewellery for one of his relatives' wedding.