India man killed four-year-old for resisting rape, stuffed body in chest

Being framed in false case, suspect says

Ghaziabad police claimed on Sunday to have nabbed a man wanted in connection with the killing of a four-year-old, Hindustan Times.

Sixty-year-old Rajendra Shah, a tenant of the deceased's family, stuffed the body of the child in a chest after stabbing him for resisting sexual assault, police said. The body of the child, who had gone missing after returning from school on December 1, 2016, was recovered from the article on June 3, 2018 from a rooftop in the vicinity of his house, months after the incident transpired.



Police claimed Shah had confessed. The man, however, said he had been framed. “I was drunk that day and did not know what had happened to…. (the boy). I am being framed and have no involvement in the case. It was the boy’s father who asked me to leave his house. I never ran away from their house,” he told newsmen at a police station.

With autopsy findings proving inconclusive, police are set to probe the matter further. The aforementioned confession is inadmissible in court, the fource said.

 



The man lived with his sister and nephew in the ground floor of the boy's house. His family was asked to vacate the premise a few months after the child went missing. "“We were busy searching for my son and never found anything unusual like blood etc in (Shah)’s room. We never got any foul smell even as the body was on the rooftop,” the father of the deceased said.

The suspect went missing after leaving the boy's house.  “This made us suspicious. Our teams tried to search him in Delhi, Haryana and Bihar but he gave us the slip each time. We arrested him from Sahibabad as he had come here and called the boy’s father as he thought that he had sent police to his native place in Bihar,” Sahibabad Circle Officer Rakesh Mishra said.

Police efforts to locate the body of the deceased came to naught with some children searching for a lost cricket ball chancing upon the remains 18 months after.

Earlier in late 2016, police claimed to have nabbed two men trying to extort money from the family of the deceased. Irfan and Aftab have been charged on this account.

This story originally appeared on Hindustan Times.