Delhi: Man kills 6-year-old, body found inside bed 3 days later

According to police, Rohit initially claimed that he just wanted to “smack the boy in the head” to “teach him a lesson”. But the boy’s head banged against the bed, and he started to bleed. However, it was later revealed that Rohit had strangled the child for 10 minutes, after which he started to bleed from his nose.

The victim lived with his father Jhola Ram (38) and mother Ramrati (36), both labourers, and two elder brothers, Lalit (22) and Ram Tej (17), at Janta Jeevan Rajeev camp in Okhla Phase II.

The boy’s family told The Indian Express that they had made him drop out of a regular school as they were afraid he would be “kidnapped or murdered”. “He was the youngest in the family. We had made sure he would not have to put up with the dangers we did. The local school was more than 2 km away. So we got him enrolled in a local anganwadi a few metres from our house,” said Lalit.

On September 27, while his mother was busy cooking food, the boy wandered outside and went missing. “I thought he was playing. He never came back and we started looking for him. At night, we registered a missing complaint at the local police station,” said his father.

The boy was later found by a local, Radha, who claimed that she thought the smell was of a dead rat, until she found his body in a plastic bag. “We identified the owner of the house, Sarvani Devi. Rukmani was her daughter-in-law. We went around the locality and made contact with a shopkeeper, who told us that Rohit, Rukmani’s son, had taken the same bag filled with wheat flour a few days before the murder,” said DCP (southeast) Romil Baaniya.

Rohit was eventually arrested by police. “He had kidnapped the boy so he could get ransom from his father and recover the money. But when he realised the boy would identify him, he strangled him,” an officer said.