Man arrested for killing four-year-old girl in Haridwar to take revenge on parents
PIONEER NEWS SERVICE/Haridwar
The police arrested a man, Suraj, for allegedly killing a four-year-old girl in Haridwar district to take revenge on the parents. The Haridwar senior superintendent of police Pramendra Singh Dobhal said that the girl had gone missing from the Rodibelwala area on the evening of May 15. Her father lodged a missing complaint at the Nagar Kotwali police station and on May 16, police recovered the child’s body from a railway tunnel. He said that the victim’s family identified Suraj as the last person seen with the child. According to them, Suraj had been staying in the family’s temporary shelter for the past four to five months and worked as a scrap collector. The parents suspected that Suraj had taken the child to Saharanpur and they searched the area but failed to locate her or the accused. Dobhal said that the forensic team collected evidence from the crime scene and the SP (Crime) Jitendra Mehra supervised the investigation. Police teams questioned residents from nearby shanties and various ghats, including Har Ki Paidi, Sarvanand Ghat and Vishnu Ghat. They also reviewed footage from around 600-700 CCTV cameras between Haridwar and Saharanpur and used social media to track the accused. The SSP said that the police arrested Suraj from a scrap settlement in Laksar based on a tip-off on Friday. During interrogation, Suraj revealed that he is a resident of Sunnagadhi, Kasganj district, Uttar Pradesh and had been living in Rodibelwala. He met the girl’s parents Bambam Das and Rekha in 2021. Suraj later developed a physical relationship with Rekha. Das confronted and humiliated Suraj and then forced him to leave their shelter after finding about his affair with his wife. The SSP said that to take revenge for the humiliation, Suraj allegedly lured the couple away under the pretext of buying groceries and took the child with him. He entered a railway tunnel and allegedly strangled the girl with a thread tied around his neck. He left the tunnel with a sack to avoid suspicion, the SSP said. The inspector general of Garhwal range announced a reward of Rs 25,000 for the investigating team and the SSP announced a reward of Rs 5,000.
