Kamal Ghorui
INDORE: A 13-year-old eighth-grade student was lured to the terrace of an apartment building in Indore on the pretext of receiving kite string as a gift, strangled and bludgeoned to death, and then stuffed into a storage compartment beneath a bed where the primary suspect’s ailing grandmother slept unknowingly overnight, police said Saturday. The gruesome discovery in Indore’s MIG area, at Sridevi Apartment in Srinagar Main Colony, sent shockwaves through the locality after the boy went missing from outside his home around 7.30 pm on Friday. His family filed a missing person report. Residents, later, found his blood-stained jacket on the roof and a bag in a rubbish pile behind the complex.
Police arrested the 21-year-old and detained his alleged accomplice, a 15-year-old teenager. “The police is examining all possible angles, including whether there was a sexual assault or not, to establish the exact reasons behind the murder of the victim,” Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Amrendra Singh told TOI. Preliminary investigations suggest the killing may have stemmed from a sudden, heated argument, though the exact motive remains under verification as a post-mortem report is awaited. Bloodstains on the roof appeared to have been partially scrubbed away. MIG Police Station in-charge C B Singh said the boy was first strangled with a nylon rope on the rooftop before attackers used a brick to bludgeon his face, ensuring he was dead. The body was then carried down to a fourth-floor flat owned by the family of the primary suspect, a 21-year-old lathe machine worker from the Gwaltoli area. There, he placed the remains inside a “box bed” – a storage bed with a lidded compartment – shut the cover, laid a mattress on top, and had his ailing grandmother sleep on it that night, investigators said. In a macabre bid to conceal the crime, the suspect spent Friday night and Saturday morning walking alongside police and the victim’s family, pretending to help in the search. But his nervous behavior and shifting expressions aroused the suspicions of CB Singh. Under intensive interrogation and during a thorough search of the apartment, the suspect confessed and pointed police to the bed where the body was stashed. Adding to the eerie scene, police noted writing in the dust on a car windscreen parked near the building that read, “Teko Marna Nahi Thaa” – translating roughly to “I did not mean to kill you” or “You should not have to be killed.”
