According to the chargesheet, Kumar’s statement that the knife was part of the toolbox was made on September 10.
Less than 36 hours after a seven-year-old child was murdered inside the ground-floor bathroom of a prominent Gurgaon school last September, police had zeroed in on a bus conductor, given him a few minutes before TV news cameras, and provided a confession — straight from the mouth of the accused.
The case, which had captured the nation’s attention, seemed neatly wrapped up and justice served with unusual swiftness. Almost five months later, though, a chargesheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in court has provided a measure of just how botched up the investigation was — with multiple witnesses alleging coercion, forensic evidence contradicting police claims, and the conductor himself, now out on bail, alleging he was tortured to extract a false confession.
The conductor
It was at 8 am on September 8 that the father of the murdered Class II student last saw him, walking into school with his elder sister. By the time he returned home, around 8.10 am, the school called and said his son had been injured. At 8.37 am, minutes after he arrived at Artemis Hospital in an “unconscious and unresponsive state”, the child was declared brought dead.
The postmortem was conducted at 3 pm the same day, establishing “shock and haemorrhage following ante mortem single-edged sharp weapon injury” as the cause of death. According to the Gurgaon Police probe, the murder weapon was a knife from the toolbox of conductor Ashok Kumar’s bus. Police had claimed Kumar confessed to taking the knife inside the school to clean it.
Police also said that in his confessional statement, Kumar said he had gone to the boys’ bathroom to masturbate. Police said Kumar told them that when the child walked in, he “pulled him inside the toilet” and tried to sexually assault him. Police had further claimed that Kumar killed the boy as he was afraid that he would reveal his “kali kartut” to others, and get him fired.
According to his confessional statement, seeing blood splattered everywhere, Kumar became nervous, threw the knife in the toilet and left the child there, before coming out to wash his hands. When teachers found the boy and sought help to carry him to the car, Kumar assisted them to “hide his guilt”, the statement said. By the time the CBI, which took over the case on September 22, was done with its probe, all of this was established as mere fiction.
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The coercion
One of the key testimonies that helped the CBI rule out Kumar’s role was provided by Saurabh Raghav, the driver of the bus on which Kumar was deployed. Raghav revealed that there was no knife in their toolbox and that he had cleaned the box just two days before the murder. He told the CBI he had informed Gurgaon Police about this as well.
Apart from Kumar, Raghav was also one of two people who alleged that Gurgaon Police had tried to “pressure” him into admitting to things that weren’t true. He alleged that on September 8, while questioning him, police personnel tried to pressure him into saying that the knife was in the toolbox, but he did not give in.
According to the chargesheet, Kumar’s statement that the knife was part of the toolbox was made on September 10. In the “first disclosure statement”, it was claimed that he had purchased the knife from a shop in Agra. The CBI probe revealed that Gurgaon Police “did not conduct any investigation with regard to the fact”.
“CBI investigation did not substantiate that… Kumar had taken the knife from the bus,” the chargesheet said.
The other person who alleged police pressure was Harpal, the school gardener. He said that on September 18, he had been coerced into saying he had seen Kumar inside the toilet. He further told CBI that he had been “pressured” into saying there were bloodstains on Kumar’s clothes before he picked up the child — a claim he now admits was false.
One of the teachers at the school, who was among those who transported the child to the car, corroborated this, saying that there were no bloodstains on Kumar’s clothes when she asked him to lift the child. Gajraj, another bus driver, also confirmed this.
According to the chargesheet, Kumar’s claims about having opened the child’s “knickers” to sexually assault him were also not corroborated by statements of those who were with the boy during his last minutes, or by forensic examination. The school nurse, who was among those who accompanied the child to the hospital, said that “in order to make him relax”, she had taken off his shoes and socks and opened the belt and button of his knickers in the car. Another conductor, Manoj Kumar, who accompanied the boy to the hospital, corroborated this claim.
The Report of the Regional Forensic Science Laboratory said that no semen could be detected on the child’s underwear, and also established that no sexual assault had taken place. “CBI investigation revealed there was no seminal stain either at the scene of crime… or on the dress/underwear/anal swabs… This further rules out the theory of masturbation and sexual assault,” the chargesheet stated.
Forensic reports further established that Kumar’s fingerprints, taken by Gurgaon Police during their investigation, “did not match with chance fingerprints” lifted from the crime scene on September 8. This was confirmed by the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) report as well, which established that the conductor’s fingerprints did not match with “chance prints/bloodstained footwear impressions lifted” from the crime scene.
When taken into one-day remand by the CBI on September 23-24, Kumar “refused to have committed the murder”, saying that he had confessed because of “coercion and threat”, and that police “tortured and beat” him to extract the statements.
“Further, he also revealed that he had given a confessional statement before media under threat and coercion of Gurgaon Police officials,” the chargesheet said. Despite this, Gurgaon Police is yet to fix accountability. Gurgaon Police Commissioner Sandeep Khirwar said: “I have not read the chargesheet yet. But if the CBI has any recommendations, these will be made before the court or submitted to the state headquarters or the state government, with the requisite material and documentation. If and when that happens, we will take action accordingly.”
Sushil Tekriwal, counsel for the child’s father, responded, “It should not happen that they fix the liability at the sub-inspector and assistant sub-inspector level and officers at higher levels, like SHOs, get a clean chit. All those involved in the crime, as well as the questionable investigation that followed, must be held accountable.”
The bus conductor, too, wants justice: “I want to make sure the police personnel, who made me undergo such torture and made me a criminal for no reason, are punished. Once my case is closed, I hope to pursue this.”
Over two months since he got bail, and despite getting a clean chit in the CBI chargesheet, Kumar has been unable to land a stable job. “I did not commit the murder but the case was so prominent that everyone knows me. This has led to problems in getting a job… I am thinking of selling vegetables to make a living,” he said.
The juvenile
With the conductor in the clear, the CBI’s needle of suspicion shifted towards a Class XI student of the same school. According to the chargesheet, when he returned home from school on September 8, the 16-year-old — now the only person named as the accused — felt “relaxed” after he saw on TV that the bus conductor had been arrested. At 11.30 pm on November 7, two months after the crime, the CBI apprehended the teenager. According to the agency, the boy confessed to the murder, revealing that he had killed the child in the hope of cancelling the examinations and a parent-teacher meeting.
According to the chargesheet, he purchased the knife from a shop in Sohna market. The CBI further said that he trawled the internet to learn how to commit the murder without implicating himself — looking at information “about poisoning, various poisons, their effects and their sources, during August-September 2017”. He also searched the internet to understand how to remove fingerprints. But on learning that the only way was “to damage his own hand by charring or putting acid”, he dropped the idea.
According to the CBI, he lured the victim into the bathroom “on the pretext of seeking his help in taking some article from inside”. As per the CBI, footage from two CCTV cameras installed in the vicinity of the bathroom was among the key evidence that helped them crack the case — it showed the accused “walking very closely with the child towards the reception gallery”. A few seconds later, the child is seen entering the washroom, followed by the accused, who finally re-emerges 75 seconds later, alone.
CBI officials, however, were not the first to involve the teenager in the investigation. Gurgaon Police had recorded his statements on two occasions — September 15 and 19. He was brought in for questioning after Harpal — who was the first to see the injured child — revealed that he had been alerted to the murder by “one elder student… wearing school dress and a bag on his shoulder”, who came out of the bathroom and told him that “something happened to the child” before leaving the spot “with speed”.
In his statements to police, the accused claimed he had entered the bathroom after hearing a “vomiting-like sound” from inside. Suspicion fell on him after this claim was contradicted by witnesses as well as medical authorities.
The physical training teacher at the school told the CBI that he, too, had been informed about the murder by the accused. The accused had told him that “one child is lying near the washroom and is vomiting blood”, minutes after he had told the gardener that the child was inside the toilet.
According to the chargesheet, Dr Deepak Mathur, who conducted the autopsy, said the injured child could only have been able to “raise a feeble gurgling sound” after the injuries he sustained “since the throat was slit… deeply, which results in continuity in voice passage getting broken, so no voice is possible”.
Another fact that aroused the CBI’s suspicion was why the accused was on the ground floor in the first place. “… it was unusual for students of senior classes to roam around on the ground floor… senior students do not generally use the toilet on the ground floor,” the chargesheet said.In his statement to police, the accused claimed he had asked one of his friends to meet him near the water cooler, who in turn had asked him to wait there.
During CBI investigation, however, the friend denied having asked the accused to wait near the water cooler, sticking to his statement even when he and the accused were brought face to face. The friend further said that on September 15, when the accused was first confronted by police, he called him up and told him the version he had narrated to police, and asked him to stick to the same story.
CCTV footage also showed that the friend had reached his classroom on the second floor even before the accused entered the building. Asked what he was really doing near the water cooler, the accused said he was “having maje (fun)”.
The friend was also among some students who claimed that the accused had, in July 2017, asked them to bring a knife or poison to school “as he wanted to kill someone” in order “to cancel the parent-teacher meeting as well as the exams”.
Another student claimed before the CBI that a few days before the murder, the accused had said he intended to “mix the poison in the water bottle of some child, or in the water tank, in order to kill some child or someone else”. Three other boys claimed he had told them: “Don’t prepare for the exams as they are not going to be held this time. Don’t waste your time.” The teenager, according to the chargesheet, told CBI that “his performance in school was below average and he was afraid of exams and the parent-teacher meeting as his teacher may complain against him to his parents”.
The CBI chargesheet also states that in February 2016, the accused had made an attempt to avoid the examinations by mixing “some obnoxious substance” in his own water bottle. “The documents collected… prove that he did not appear for the mock examination conducted in February 2016. During the examination period, he was admitted in the hospital for three-four days,” states the chargesheet.
While the CBI, in the chargesheet, said there is “sufficient evidence in the form of oral, documentary, expert opinion(s) of CFSL, etc” against the teenager, and has pressed for him to be tried as an adult, the victim’s father said he expected more.
“We were expecting a stronger chargesheet. We hope that in the supplementary chargesheet, which is yet to be filed, school officials will also be held responsible, since lapses in their security arrangements contributed to the crime.”