“It was a small room… das by das (10×10 feet). There was little light inside. Clothes… there were clothes of the woman lying around… a few of the man too. A thin mattress had been shoved towards the wall. There was an iron trunk in one corner. There was a stench, a horrible stench.”
Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Ramesh Kumar vividly remembers every detail of that day 16 years, 11 months and 24 days ago. “The rotting body of a 22-year-old woman was inside the iron trunk,” he says. “I can never forget what I saw that day.”
Kumar was a 30-year-old beat constable, posted at Kalkaji police station, in 2007 when the 22-year-old woman was murdered in Govindpuri.
When the Police Control Room received a call on June 7, 2007, he recalls, he was part of the team sent to check the crime scene. “Our suspect was Virendra Singh. The landlord who made the call told us Singh and the woman were his tenants,” says the ASI.
The landlord said Singh paid part of his rent and left town, promising to pay the rest when he returned. He never came back. A few days later, the landlord called police as “there was a foul smell coming from Singh’s room”.
“The landlord had a tenant verification form which had Singh’s photograph and phone number. We were confident he (Singh) would be arrested soon,” Kumar recalls. “But that was not the case. We tried to trace him but he had completely vanished.”
Kumar was soon transferred but he didn’t stop returning to this case. “… I’d seen a lot of bodies with knife and gunshot wounds… but there was something about this case I could not forget… the woman was killed in such a gruesome manner…,” he says.
It was on Friday, the 10th of May, that ASI Kumar finally arrested Singh from Vijay Vihar in Rohini. “We had a suspicion Singh was in the area. I had gone to make some inquiries at Vijay Vihar. I was in civilian clothes. A shopkeeper pointed me towards a lane and there he was. I grabbed him without losing a second,” he says.
For Kumar, it wasn’t merely a professional pursuit — it was personal. “I couldn’t forget the sight of the woman…,” he says.
What happened over these 16 years?
ASI Kumar was part of the initial probe but was transferred to Mehrauli police station. “After some time, I lost track of the case,” he says.
Ten years later, he was sent to Kalkaji police station again. This time as Head Constable. Kumar recalls that the SHO formed a team and asked them to look into unsolved cases. “I scanned the list of absconding criminals and saw Singh’s name,” he says. Singh had been on the run for a decade then.
Kumar says he “activated his informants in Govindpuri from my beat constable days” to work on the case. He alleges Singh was notorious in the area. “He would push girls into prostitution,” the ASI claims.
Singh was still allegedly running his network but not in Govindpuri and nearby localities; he had shifted to Panipat. One of Kumar’s sources managed to procure Singh’s phone number which finally helped the police to track him down. Kumar, however, says, “Somehow, Singh got a tip-off and escaped again”.
The trail went cold again. Kumar was transferred to the Anti-Gang Squad in the Crime Branch this February. “We were asked to round up proclaimed offenders before elections. I remembered Singh and went after him.”
ASI Kumar says he wouldn’t have accomplished his mission without Inspector Pawan Kumar who devised a fool-proof plan to catch Singh. “We took his old phone number and checked which bank accounts were linked to it. We then pulled out his PAN details. The new phone number was linked to his PAN,” Kumar says. “We traced his location to Vijay Vihar and went there… our team scanned the area for days.”
The day ASI Kumar finally arrested Singh, he says, he had gone alone to make a few more inquiries. “Words can’t describe how happy I am,” he adds.
Based on Singh’s questioning, police in a statement claim he came to Delhi in 1991 from Bihar’s Vaishali to work as a taxi driver. In 2001, he became part of the “prostitution business to earn easy money”. “He pushed young girls from West Bengal and Bihar into sex work. He paid Rs 10,000 and got the 22-year-old woman in his custody in May 2007,” claim police.
When she refused to go to work on June 4, 2007, police claim, he “strangled the woman and kept her body inside an iron trunk before fleeing to Kolkata”. He hid in Siliguri and kept changing locations to avoid detection. In 2013, he shifted to Panipat and finally returned to Delhi in 2019 to live in Vijay Vihar, say police.
ASI Ramesh Kumar (centre) nabbed the accused, Virendra Singh, on May 10. (File Photo) 
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