Delhi serial killer murdered his little victims before having sex

NEW DELHI: A suspected child killer in outer Delhi’s Begumpur area sexually abused the corpses of a dozen children he had murdered over the past seven years, which is akin to the psychological condition called necrophilia, police said on Sunday quoting his statement.

The serial killer, 23-year-old Ravinder Kumar, was arrested on Thursday while police were looking for a missing six-year-old girl. His confession during questioning was a grim echo of the 2006 Nithari serial killings.

Kumar, a slightly-built bus cleaner, apparently told police he lured children with candy, killed if they resisted and had sex with the bodies. In all, he had sexually assaulted 15 kids between 2008 and 2015 in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, police said.

“One of his victims, a six-year- old boy survived despite being drugged, sodomised, bludgeoned on the head and his throat slit. He was dumped for dead near a gutter in Begumpur last year,” an officer said.

Kumar’s statement said he committed two similar crimes at his relatives’ hometown in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh.

The 5-feet-5-inch man, who blamed alcohol and porn shown to him by his friends for his misdeeds, showed signs of an unstable mind when he briefly interacted with the media on the way to court. “I would have continued targeting children had I not been caught. I felt bad but did it again the next time I drank. I would have asked for stringent punishment had a similar crime been committed with my child,” he told a news channel. Psychologists said he probably suffers from an unusual and horrifying disorder called necrophilia rather than paedophilia, a condition where a person feels sexually attracted towards children. In necrophilia, people are sexually aroused by dead people or corpses.

“It is difficult to generalise, but people who have such behaviours usually have low self-esteem and are poor at maintaining normal adult relationships. So, they satisfy their urge for power as well as sex with children or dead bodies. They might also have a deprived childhood,” said Dr Smita Deshpande, head of psychiatry at PGIMER, Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital.

Kumar was born into a poor family at Ganjduware village in Badaun, UP, in 1992. Father Brahmanand, a plumber, moved his family of six to Karala in outer Delhi in 2007 after finding it difficult to make ends meet at his hometown. Police said Kumar committed his first crime in 2008, but it went unreported.