Class XI student among five held for murder in Ghaziabad

GHAZIABAD: Five persons, including a quack and a Class XI student, have been arrested for allegedly kidnapping and murdering an 11-year-old boy in Modinagar area on April 27.
Police said 48-year-old Krishan Pal, who posed as a medical practitioner, planned the murder as revenge for a petty fight he had with his neighbour — the boy’s family — over encroachment on a drain in Manavtapuri Colony a couple of months back, and roped in his wife Asha (40), brother Sohanveer (59) and 20-year-old nephew Akash, a Class XI student, to carry it out.
Akash had, in turn, hired his two friends — 22-year-old Sudhanshu, a BA first-year student, and Ajay — to execute the kidnapping, but he hid the fact about the plot to kill the minor, police said. Ajay is currently on the run, but others have been arrested.
In fact, on April 27 night, Sudhanshu and Ajay approached the child while he was playing outside his house with other kids and asked the location of his father’s grocery shop. Though he gave the directions, the duo persuaded him to go with them on their bike to identify it.
The boy’s body was found in a sugarcane field in Niwadi the next day.
SP (rural) Neeraj Kumar Jadaun said though initially police registered a case against unknown persons, they zeroed in on Krishan when the boy’s father, Sanjeev Kumar Bansal, recently told them about the tiff he had with his neighbour over a drain passing through the area two months back.
“Krishan had then issued a threat, but Sanjeev did not take it seriously. In order to teach Sanjeev a lesson, the accused hatched a plan to murder the minor boy and involved his other family members and nephew Akash in the plan. We detained him and upon sustained interrogation, he confessed to the crime,” he said.
And when cops nabbed the others, it came to the fore that Akash had identified the child while he was playing, and Sudhanshu and Ajay had kidnapped him.
“They gave a sleeping pill to the child so that he did not raise an alarm and took him to Niwadi. As he suddenly woke up, the trio strangled him to death, within one hour of kidnapping him,” Jadaun said.
Initially, the three had plans to dump the body in the nearby Ganga canal, but they panicked and left it on a sugarcane field, the SP (rural) added.
All the accused have been charged under IPC sections 364 (kidnapping or abducting in order to murder) and 302 (murder) at Modinagar police station.