Police on Tuesday arrested a 29-year-old taxi driver who had kidnapped a 10-year-old girl from south Delhi’s Chattarpur and raped her in the car before killing her and dumping her body. The incident took place in the early hours of Monday, with the accused being taken into custody more than six hours after Vikaspuri, where he was dropping off a passenger.
The accused, identified as Bashu Kumar Singh, hails from Chhabra in Bihar and currently lives in Gurugram. He reportedly kidnapped the minor girl while she was sleeping on the roadside with her family, after they were evicted from their rented room in Chhatarpur after returning from their village in Chhabra in Bihar.
The accused has been booked under kidnapping, rape and murder sections under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Act as well as relevant sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act. Police said he had previously been booked in three assault cases and two attempt to murder cases in Bihar.
A six-hour search operation leads to the arrest of the accused
• 4 am – The taxi driver kidnapped the minor girl while she was sleeping with her family on the roadside near CDR Chowk in Chattarpur. According to the account he provided to the police, the driver was drunk at the time of the accident. He was in the area to pick up a passenger, but the flight was cancelled, and he later discovered the 10-year-old.
• 4.15 AM – The First Information Report (FIR) filed by the police, as per an earlier HT report, states that the minor’s father woke up around 4.15 am and noticed his daughter was missing. He then saw her screaming from inside the WagonR as it drove away.
Demanding justice for his daughter, the father said: “We don’t know how this happened. I was asleep and I woke up… I saw my daughter was not there. I heard her screaming ‘Daddy’… She picked up a stick and ran after the car but she ran away… Her last word was ‘Daddy’.”
• 4.58 AM – The family initially tried to search for the girl on their own. But after failing to find her, they called the police.
• 5.15 AM – After the family contacted the police, a police force arrived at the scene and began searching for the minor girl. The police relied on the description of the car provided by the minor’s father to determine the location of the car.
• 6.30 – 7 am – The accused allegedly raped and killed the girl on the Faridabad-Gurugram road and dumped her body in a nearby forest area. After kidnapping the minor, the taxi driver took her to the Mandi village area, two kilometers away, where he raped her inside the car.
• 11 am – Police looked into the footage captured by CCTV cameras near the Metro station, CDR Chowk, Mandi Village and Chhatarpur Road. An investigating officer said that in one of the shots, the accused was seen in a car with the minor, adding that the car’s number plate was also visible.
Police used the information to identify the driver, after which he was tracked down and arrested between 11 a.m. and noon and taken in for questioning.
• 5 pm – Over the next five hours or so, the police questioned the taxi driver, who kept changing his statements. After confirming that the accused had killed the girl, the police asked him to take them to the crime scene. “We asked him to take us to the specified location, and at around 5 p.m., we found the body,” the investigating officer said.
The driver then allegedly confessed to raping the 10-year-old girl, after which he said he strangled the minor and hit her in the chest with a rock.
• 8.30 pm – The police took the accused for entertainment on the Mandi village road, during which he tried to escape by pushing two police officers. The accused also snatched a policeman’s gun and fired at them, injuring him in the leg and he was later taken to Madan Mohan Malaviya Hospital.
