At Safdarjung Hospital on Sunday. Express photo
The 18-year-old son of a former Manipur minister died on Saturday evening after he allegedly fell from the terrace of a restaurant in south Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village. Additional DCP (south) Chinmoy Biswal said the boy, identified as Sidharth, son of Manipur’s former Home and Education minister M Okendru, was taken to Safdarjung Hospital where he died of his injuries.
He added that a case has been registered under IPC Section 304 (culpable homicide) at Safdarjung Enclave police station after Sidharth’s sister claimed his death was suspicious. “We are probing if it was an accident or if he was pushed off the terrace. We are also looking at CCTV footage from nearby buildings,” Biswal said. On Sunday, police said the postmortem was conducted at AIIMS and his body was handed over to his relatives.
“We received a PCR call at 4.10 pm that a boy had fallen from building number 28 in Hauz Khas Village. A police team reached the spot and found that the boy had been taken to hospital. On inspecting the spot where he fell, the team found some broken pots. They also found the victim’s belongings, including his purse, phone and spectacles, on the terrace. No eyewitnesses were found at the spot,” Biswal said.
Police said CCTV footage from one of the restaurants in the same building shows Sidharth going up to the terrace, where no one was allowed, around 3.44 pm. Footage from the building’s camera shows him falling from the terrace around 4 pm.
Meanwhile, a day after the incident, business was back to usual in Hauz Khas Village.
But the murmurs in the dingy lane that led up to the building where the incident took place were all about Sidharth.
Otherwise a haven for cheap drinks, relaxed rules and loud music, on Sunday, one of the bars in the building asked every guest for ID.
“We were given instructions yesterday to check everyone’s ID… Someone fell from the building and died. If you don’t have an ID, you can’t enter,” said the young man on guard at the entrance of the lane. At the bar, a senior staff member said, “We have told police everything we had to say… and shared CCTV footage as well. The boy was not even here.”
