‘Our boy couldn’t even kill a rat’ POLICE HINT AT SUICIDE PACT; CAN’T BE: DOC
JIND RAPEMURDER Family says police made them believe the boy was a killer; his body was found in a 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-yearold 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 who, too, talked less 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 sometimes but it never came across as if they were in a relationship,” Khurana said.
Kurukshetra superintendent of police Abhishek Garg said on Wednesday the two were in touch, a claim vehemently 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.
Like most girls in the village, she would go to the tuition centre on her own but her mother would walk her back from the classes that were held in the evening.
When the mother found her missing at the tuition 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. KURUKSHETRA: The doctor, who conducted autopsy on t he 15-year-old girl whose mutilated body was found more than 100km away in Jind on January 12, said all scientific evidence suggested she was “brutally gang raped”.
The police, however, on Wednesday hinted at a possibility of a suicide pact between the girl and her schoolmate, who was until Tuesday the main suspect in the rape and murder of the girl. The 18-year-old youth’s body was found in a canal near Kirmach village of Kurukshetra district.
Abhishek Garg, superintendent of police (Kurukshetra), on Wednesday said the two deaths could also be suicides. “Both were youngsters...emotional,” he said, adding that it was established that the two teenagers were in touch. When pointed out that both the victims were found without any clothes below their waists, he said garments do come off when bodies remain in water for long. He said the final report on the possibility of a sexual assault or the cause of both their deaths was still awaited.
Dr SK Dhattarwal, head of forensic medicine at PGIMS, Rohtak, who oversaw the post-mortem examination of the girl, said that her death was anything but suicide.
“In my career, I have conducted or overseen 35,000 postmortem examinations and have given expert opinion in 3,000 cases. The girl had 19 injuries and they could not be caused by suicide,” he said.
“The girl’s sexual organs, including her vagina and anus, were badly torn. The hair from her scalp was cut off. It was a brutal sexual assault on her. One person could not have committed such a brutal crime. There certainly were two or more persons,” he said.
Dhattarwal, who is also the medico-legal advisor to the Haryana government, said, “I believe she was forcibly drowned after being sexually assaulted.”