Delhi HC upholds life term for man convicted of kidnapping, murder of boy in 2007

The boy’s father had lodged a police complaint in October 2007 claiming that his son was kidnapped. The kidnapper had demanded Rs 1.5 crore as ransom, but later finalised it at Rs 33 lakh.

The prosecution argued that the child was kidnapped by the accused, who was known to the child’s family, when was returning home from school on October 15, 2007. He was dropped by the school bus at the gate of the society in Rohini where he lived, and was kidnapped after he entered the society’s premises.

According to the prosecution, the kidnapper made ransom calls to the child’s father and said he would receive the money in Delhi and the child would be given back to the family in Meerut.

The police arrested the accused from his house in Old Rajinder Nagar based on call detail records, IMEI numbers of the mobile phone and recorded conversations, while the ransom money was recovered from his bedroom. On October 17, the police recovered the child’s body from the bushes near a village in Murthal, Sonipat.

The accused challenged the trial court’s judgment saying it was based on circumstantial evidence. He argued that the trial court had ignored many broken links and unexplained circumstances leading to the impugned order of conviction and order of sentence.

Perusing the evidence and the arguments, the high court held that the “the guilt of the appellant (man) for the murder of the deceased has been proved beyond reasonable doubt by the prosecution”. Dismissing the appeal, the high court held, “this Court finds no error in the impugned judgment of conviction and order on sentence by the learned Trial Court”.

Examining the evidence, the high court held that the death of the child was “clearly homicidal” in nature based on the testimonies of the doctors who had conducted the post-mortem at the General Hospital in Sonipat.

The high court found the accused had procured a SIM in someone else’s name and used it to make ransom calls, kidnapped the child and murdered him on the same day. In the evening, he left the child’s body along the highway and disposed of his belongings in another location.

The high court held that the accused “constructively misled the parents of the deceased” telling them that he would be taking the boy to Muzaffarnagar/Meerut when in fact he misdirected the father to come to Meerut to collect the child, which did not fructify even though the father did go to Meerut along with another prosecution witness.

“This was clearly a deliberate attempt to mislead the parents and anybody assisting them to different locations in order to ensure that anybody on his track would have been sufficiently distracted. The modus operandi adopted by the appellant was clearly diabolical considering that he picked up the child of a known family from the residential society at a specific point of time which was known to him and then while demanding ransom murdered the child and pursuant to that misled the parents, ensured that someone would deliver the ransom amount to him, and thereafter disposed of not only the SIM which was being used for ransom but also the mobile handset in/near the Yamuna river,” the court observed.

The high court further rejected the contention of the appellant that his wife had been put to a lie detector test, was questioned about the incident and had stated that she did not know anything about it and was not found to be lying.

The court further held that this contention cannot support the case of the prosecution in any manner, for the reason that it “would be quite and totally possible that the wife had no knowledge of what her husband (accused) was conspiring to do in order to acquire money from illegal means of kidnapping”.