Boy kidnapped for sexual assault, condition critical

A six-year-old boy was first abducted and then thrown into a dry septic tank with his throat slashed when his kidnappers panicked on hearing the victim’s mother raise an alarm.

The boy was rescued almost 17 hours after he was kidnapped, said a police officer, adding that his abductors wanted to sexually assault him.

 The boy was found in a critical condition and his condition continues to remain serious at a hospital. The two alleged kidnappers were also arrested and it was at their instance that the boy was recovered.

The incident took place at outer Delhi’s Begumpur area during the early hours of Wednesday. The victim’s mother, Lalita Paswan, 30, had approached Begumpur police station to lodge a missing complaint.

Lalita told police that she went to sleep along with her four children in the front room of their rented house late on Tuesday night. She woke up at around 2.30 am and noticed that Shibbu was not in the room. Lalita raised an alarm and launched a search in the vicinity but failed to locate Shibbu.

When all her efforts failed, she approached the police which formed a team and launched a search.

“One of the victim’s neighbours told us that he had seen a young boy crying while being carried away by two persons. We worked on the lead and identified the two suspects,” a police officer associated with the probe told Deccan Herald.

Police went to the houses of the suspects Dharmender, 30, and Ravinder, 22, but they were found absconding. A manhunt for the two was launched and they were arrested from the area a few hours later.

On sustained interrogation, they revealed that they had slit the boy’s throat with a barber’s razor with an intention to kill him and thrown him into a dry septic tank in the locality. They had picked the child to sexually abuse him, but had panicked when the neighbours gathered on hearing his mother’s cries.

Police found the boy in a critical condition but alive inside the septic tank and he was taken to a hospital. Dharmender runs a barber shop at Begumpur and Ravinder works with an import-export factory at Karol Bagh.