Jind rape horror: Teen named prime suspect also found dead
Kin say cops made them believe the boy was a killer; his body was found in canal
KURUKSHETRA: An 18-year-old man, the police’s prime suspect in the brutal rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl in Haryana’s Jind district last week, was found dead in a canal near Kurukshetra late on Tuesday night.
The man was naked below his waist, but no external injuries were visible on his decomposing body found in the Bhakra irrigation canal, said Abhishek Garg, SP (Kurukshetra).
This discovery adds a dramatic twist to a case involving horrific violence and seemingly throws to the wind the police’s theory that the man was one of the culprits who had gang-raped and killed the girl. The girl’s body had been found in a semi-naked condition on Friday with a torn shirt the only clothing on her body, the autopsy report had said. Dr SK Dhattarwal, who had overseen the autopsy, said her injuries suggested she had been “brutally raped” by at least two persons before being killed.
The girl and the man, a Class 12 youth, were both Dalits who went to the same private school and took tuitions from the same teachers in Kurukshetra’s Jhansa village, less than 200 kilometres from Delhi. The two had gone missing after they left separately for tuitions late afternoon on January 9.
Garg said the investigators were probing the role of “strangers as well as known persons”, while admitting that there had been no breakthrough in the case. The theories being suggested by the police range from “honour killing”, which, they say, “cannot be ruled out”, to a “suicide pact.”
The man’s relatives had been rounded up for questioning soon after the girl’s disappearance. Members of his family, including his father, and some of his friends were detained till Wednesday afternoon. Tensions flared in Jhansa village soon after the body was released to his relatives, who initially refused to cremate the body alleging that they had been tortured in police custody but later relented.
Saying that the two teenagers were “in touch”, the SP said the investigators had established that two had left the village together and had headed towards the Bhakra canal.
“This has been confirmed by villagers who had last seen them,” he added.
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Such incidents are very unfortunate and I am myself deeply hurt. We will take strict action against all those involved ML KHATTAR,
Haryana chief minister
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.