Tarak Ghosh
Ravinder had shown no remorse
or guilt. He told a news channel -“I would have continued targeting children
had I not been caught. I felt bad, but I did it again the next time I drank. I
would have asked for stringent punishment had a similar crime been committed
with my child,”
Ravinder Kumar was born into a
poor family in Ganjduware village in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, 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 in his hometown. Police said Ravinder
committed his first crime when he was barely 17 years old. A laborer's girl
child from a Delhi Metro construction site was his first victim. He took her to
an isolated spot, had sex with her, killed her, and then dumped the body. The
police could not find a record of the crime as it was not reported.
Most of his prey were children
from poor families like his own—those who slept on the streets or children of
construction workers whose poverty-stricken parents were unable to chaperone
them because they were working too hard to earn a living.
During the day, he worked as a
helper on a truck, and at night he would go out and hunt for children between
the ages of 3 and 8 when he felt aroused, uncaring about their gender.
Ravinder Kumar has been raping
and killing minors since 2008, and only four out of his alleged thirty victims
managed to survive. So far, police have only been able to corroborate eleven of
the cases that Kumar has confessed to after verifying local police station
records. The cases took place in Bahadurgarh, Kasgunj, Faridabad, and in the
towns of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Ravinder Kumar had earlier confessed to
assaulting children in Badayun, Aligarh, Noida, and Delhi. The 28-year-old
serial rapist, Ravinder Kumar, used to kill minor girls by strangulating them
before raping them. In one such case, which was lodged in outer Delhi’s
Kanjhawala area on July 25, 2011, he strangulated a three-year-old girl to
death and then sexually assaulted her. In 2014, the investigation into this
case was handed over to the Crime Branch.
According to Crime Branch
officials, the body of the three-year-old girl was discovered on an abandoned
plot near her residence in the Kanjhawala area. Her mother lodged a missing
persons complaint on July 25, 2011, when she found her daughter missing from
the cot. The girl was sleeping with her mother outside their house. After
Ravinder was arrested in connection with the rape and murder of a six-year-old
girl, the Crime Branch officials cross-checked his involvement in the case and
found that the culprit was the same. Sources in the Crime Branch told the media
that Ravinder Kumar in this case killed the girl and then raped her. He then
left the body on the spot and fled from the scene.
One of his victims, a
7-year-old named Sadhu (name changed), is alive after being allegedly abducted,
sodomized, drugged, and left to die near a gutter by Ravinder Kumar. And what’s
more appalling is the fact that he was kidnapped from his home when he was
sleeping next to his mother.
The victim’s mother said,
“Sadhu and my daughter were sleeping next to me. I woke up sometime in the
early hours of the morning to find that he was not in bed. I thought he must be
inside and got up to check. I woke everyone up, and we started searching for
him in nearby areas. But Sadhu was nowhere to be found.” In this case, he was
also arrested but granted bail because Sadhu (the victim) couldn’t identify
him.
A Special Investigation Team
(SIT), which was formed to investigate the case, took Ravinder to Narela,
Bawana, and Alipur, where he was identified. The team, along with local police,
would investigate cases of missing children in the two states that border
Delhi. A massive operation was being conducted to know if the cases of missing
children filed in the past five years in Vijay Nagar, Bawana, Narela, Alipur,
Begumpur, Kanjhawala, Samaypur Badli, and other areas are related to this case.
It has been found that Ravinder Kumar was involved in over 38 cases. However,
it was expected that the murder toll may rise to 40 as the revelations
continue. Ravinder Kumar later confessed to the police about his involvement in
the case and about 15 other similar cases in Delhi, the National Capital Region
(NCR), and western UP. He told the police that he used to abduct children after
luring them with toffees or money and would take them to an isolated spot where
he would rape and then strangle them to death. He later dumped the bodies in
drains or fields or buried them. DCP (Outer District) Vikramjit Singh has
stated that there is adequate evidence, including scientific ones, to prove the
involvement of Ravinder in the crime.
Ravinder Kumar told police that
he was visiting his maternal uncle’s home when he committed the crime.
Following the admission, the Investigating Officer of the Delhi Police
approached Nagla Sikandar police station and came to know that they had already
registered an FIR in the case under sections 302 (murder), 364 (abduction), 201
(destruction of evidence), and 34 of the Indian Penal Code.
In 2013, he committed two crimes in Noida. He was also arrested for
assaulting a boy by slitting his throat when he worked as a cleaner in
Begumpur, South Delhi. Shockingly, he got bail in the case as the police
downplayed the enormity of the case at that time. In 2014, Kumar was arrested
for assaulting a boy in Begumpur. He abducted the boy near his house and fled
after slitting his throat. He assumed the boy was dead. But the victim
survived, as police found him bleeding in the septic tank of an
under-construction building. He spent a year in jail but was freed two months
ago after the boy, who survived the assault, failed to identify him. Kumar got
bail in that case.
During interrogation, Kumar
revealed all the kids targeted by him were under 14 years old. Ravinder Kumar
used to choose children from poor localities and never visited the same area
twice. He operated in Delhi, western UP, and parts of Haryana. He said he would
loiter near slums and under-construction buildings at night in the hope of
finding little girls or boys. He would sometimes travel several kilometers by
bus to hunt for them. “After raping and killing, I would dump the bodies in the
fields, in ponds, or in a forested area. I never returned to the spot again,”
he said.
He said he used to be on the
lookout for children even when he visited any relative’s home. He attacked two
14-year-olds known to a relative while visiting his aunt during a marriage
ceremony in Aligarh in 2012. However, they were let off after they promised to
keep Mom informed about the incident.
"I was able to find a child for myself if I stayed at any place for 10–15 days. To avoid suspicion, I never stayed at any place for more than 2–3 months,” he said. The longest he stayed at any place during his crime phase was in Noida for six months a couple of years ago, he claimed. Ravinder worked odd jobs in the city for a few months before changing jobs.
Barring one case in which he
and two friends slit a boy’s throat with a barber’s razor, he claimed to have
never used any weapons. “I wanted to leave no clues ever,” he said.
Revealing his modus operandi,
Ravinder Kumar told police that he usually committed crimes in the afternoon or
in the early hours. He would roam around in colonies either in the early hours
or in the afternoon. He would lure children playing outside their house or near
toilets with money and sweets. If they refused, he would simply kidnap them. If
the victim agreed not to reveal the matter to anyone, Kumar would let him or her
go. He has killed 11 of his victims who had resisted his attempts to sexually
assault them or threatened to expose him.
Ravindra Kumar was a serial
drug addict who used to consume locally manufactured hooch, glue, and
correction fluid, which made him lose control of his brain. “When I lose
control of my brain, I get sexually charged. I go out for a long stroll, during
which I look for vulnerable children. Sometimes, I walk for more than 10
kilometers in one go without knowing my destination or the place where I am
heading,” Kumar confessed to the interrogators.
The serial rapist-killer
Ravinder had shown no remorse or guilt.
“I would have continued
targeting children had I not been caught. I felt bad, but I 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.
He claimed that he was often
sodomized by his two neighbors—Anil and Nil—when he was 10 or 11 years old. He
was finally arrested for the rape and murder of a six-year-old girl in Begumpur
on July 16, 2015, which exposed his horrific criminal history.
