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Journalism of Courage
The murder scene provided the first clue. A black-and-white sweatshirt and a backpack lay near the body of a 19-year-old girl, metres away from a railway station in Valsad district of Gujarat, on November 14. As police rummaged through the backpack, its contents – more than one set of clothes, a mobile charger, among other things – led them to conclude that the suspect was a visitor to the town and had possibly taken the train to get here.
Over the next five days, police scoured footage from at least 5,000 CCTV cameras at railway stations across Gujarat and Maharashtra, before finally zeroing in on their man: Rahul Karamveer Jat, 30, alias Bholu, who, police say, has confessed to five murders in October-November – four of these on moving trains, in coaches reserved for the differently abled, and one, of the 19-year-old Valsad victim, near the railway station.
According to the police, Rahul, who is originally from Rohtak in Haryana, used to work as a waiter at a hotel 10 km from the railway station. That day, he had arrived from Mumbai to the town to collect his pending salary from the hotel and was on his way back when he spotted the girl near the railway station. She was heading home from her tuition centre and the railway station fell on the way. Police say he stalked the girl for up to 100 metres from the railway station and, as they reached a desolate spot, allegedly dragged her into a mango orchard nearby, raped and killed her.
Police say that in his confessions to them, he said that after raping the girl a couple of times and strangling her, he went back to the railway station, bought himself a bottle of a fruit drink and a bag of milk, drank both and allegedly went back to rape the girl. But by then, her family members, alerted by her absence and who had been tracking her entire path from the tuition centre to her home, had arrived at the murder spot. Police say Rahul hid in the bushes and watched as the distraught family discovered the body and carried it away on a motorbike. Police say he left in a hurry, leaving behind his sweatshirt and the backpack. He then allegedly took the local train to the next station, from where he was to travel to Mumbai.
Valsad district police chief Karanraj Vaghela said that after they discovered Rahul’s backpack and his black-and-white sweatshirt, they began retracing his footsteps. “The bag had three jerseys and two half pants. We suspected that the accused may have come from the railway station,” he said.
Since the railway station is without CCTV cameras, the police looked at footage from the cameras at the next station. That’s when they spotted a man wearing the same black-and-white sweatshirt, a scarf around his neck, and carrying the same black bag. He walked with a limp and was seen boarding a train headed to Bandra in Mumbai.
Police then set up 10 teams headed by inspectors who coordinated with the police chiefs in four districts. “On checking the CCTV footage, we got to know that he had come to Vapi station in Valsad on a train from Mumbai. We checked footage from every station between Vapi and Mumbai Central and finally spotted him on the CCTV at Dadar station (in Mumbai),” Vaghela said.
Meanwhile, police teams in Gujarat’s Navsari and Surat districts mapped his photograph with jail records, but found no prisoner matching his description. They then checked the national database of prisoners and finally struck a match – Rahul, a resident of Mokhra Khaas village in Haryana’s Rohtak district, had been released from Jodhpur jail in Rajasthan in May this year.
Inspector Parkash Chand, Station House Officer of Bahuakbarpur police station under whose jurisdiction Rahul’s Rohtak village falls, told The Indian Express, “Rahul has 11 FIRs against him in various parts of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Mathura and Rajasthan. We got his contact from his family and put his number under surveillance.”
Meanwhile, the Gujarat Police, which had been coordinating with the railway police across stations in Mumbai, discovered that Rahul had travelled to Shirdi in Maharashtra and Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh before reaching Mumbai.
Rahul, who lost his father a few years ago, was allegedly disowned by his mother and brother. Valsad police chief Vaghela said, “As a child, Rahul was afflicted with polio in the left leg. We have reports that he was bullied by his fellow students. While he was in Class 5, he stole a bicycle. He was also fascinated by trucks but later, as a young man, he wasn’t allowed to drive trucks because of his disability. So he started stealing them. Since 2018, 13 cases of truck theft have been registered against him across police stations in UP, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan.”
According to the dossier maintained by the Haryana Police, Rahul was first arrested in Mathura (UP) in August 2015 for stealing a truck from Rohtak’s Kalanaur.
Police say Rahul stole another truck 10 months later, this time from Narnaul, about 120 km from Rohtak, on June 13, 2016. By June 14, 2016, he was in Fatehabad’s Bhuna, where he rammed the stolen truck into the wall of a godown.
Rahul’s dossier reveals a pattern — bail after bail from court, peppered with stints in jail. A seemingly remorseless Rahul would go on to steal four more trucks across Haryana between 2019 and 2022.
Between stealing trucks, on January 23, 2021, a case under the Arms Act was registered against him in Bihariganj of Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur for possessing illegal firearms. He was arrested with another illegal weapon in Vrindavan, Mathura, a few months later. On February 15, 2024, Rahul was booked on charges of robbery in the FIR registered by GRP, Jodhpur, Rajasthan at police station Metra Road.
Police say that after his arrest on November 24, Rahul confessed to killing four people – two before the November 14 murder of the teenager in Valsad and two after.
The first of these was October 20. The Andhra Pradesh Police had registered a rape-cum-murder case after the Guntkal Gutti railway station discovered the body of a middle-aged woman. Rahul had allegedly zeroed in on the woman, who was travelling from Pune to Kanyakumari in a coach reserved for the disabled, and strangled her to death, before robbing her.
Five days later, on October 25, the Karnataka Police recovered the body of a resident of Dakshina Kannada district. The victim was travelling on a train from Benguluru to Murdeshwar in the state when Rahul allegedly robbed and murdered him. In this case too, the victim was travelling in a coach reserved for the specially abled.
Then, five days after he killed the girl in Valsad, on November 19, the cleaning staff at Howrah station car shed discovered a body lying on a berth in the coach reserved for the differently abled. The body, covered with a blanket and with multiple stab wounds, was identified as that of a percussionist from Howrah who was returning from Katihar in Bihar, where he had attended a musical programme. Rahul allegedly confessed to attacking the victim and stealing his belongings, including Rs 10,000 in cash and his cell phone.
The last murder that Rahul confessed to was of a woman, a resident of Sandur in Karnataka, whose body was discovered by the Secunderabad railway police on November 24. She, too, had been strangled to death in a coach for the differently abled.
Hours later, on November 24, back in Valsad, police chief Vaghela got a tip-off: a hawker at the Bandra railway station had spotted Rahul boarding the Bandra-Bhuj train. The RPF officials at Bandra alerted the Gujarat police, who waited at Vapi station. As the train pulled in, police arrested him.
Police say they recovered three mobile phones from Rahul – one of the Valsad victim and the other of the percussionist. Police arrested him under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections related to murder and rape, besides other charges.
