Thirty-four-year-old Pushpam Kumar Sinha, arrested on Saturday for killing Ramchanphy Hongray, 19, in her second floor accommodation in South Delhi’s Munirka, was suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, police said. He has been remanded in a day’s police custody.
Sinha, a doctoral fellow in Wave Mechanics at IIT-Delhi, who earned an MSc from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, failed to befriend women and it was out of frustration that he allegedly strangled the teenage Naga girl who was visiting Delhi to meet her elder sister.
Pushpam’s father retired from Hindustan Aeronautical Limited as deputy director while his mother is a doctor who retired from government service.
Deputy commissioner of police (South) H G S Dhaliwal claimed that Sinha was a hard nut to crack during interrogation but ultimately gave way.
Sinha reportedly confessed that he was looking for an opportunity to “take revenge” as the girl had spurned him.
Dhaliwal said during interrogation Sinha also gave a sequence of events. He had everything planned.
“He felt that she (Hongray) might inform the police and so he strangled her in three minutes. To make it appear as a case of accident, he put her face on the gas stove and lit it,” Dhaliwal said.
“Initially, there was no suspicion of foul play but the post mortem report suggested that she died of strangulation and not due to burns. We zeroed in on Sinha after discreet inquiries,” he said. During searches of Sinha’s room, which is a floor below the girl’s accommodation, police came across obscene graffiti which actually gave away his pervert nature and vulgar taste.
“Even his diary entries are horrible and it was proved that he always longed for the company of women but due to some inferiority complex, he could not approach them,” Dhaliwal said, adding: “He had bought many gifts for girls like watches and teddy bears.”
Sinha had made acquaintances with the girl during the Deepawali celebrations but it had not developed into an intimate relationship as the accused expected. However, the post-mortem report said the victim was not raped.
According to her sister, who works in a Connaught Place restaurant, Sinha allegedly passed lewd comments and made vulgar gestures toward her sibling a few days back.
Meanwhile, the Delhi Police also arrested two Class XI students of a government school in South Delhi for allegedly molesting a girl from Arunachal Pradesh. The 21-year-old girl, a student of Jamia Millia Islamia University, was molested by some boys on October 22 inside the premises of Chandrashekhar Government Boys’ High School.
The incident occurred when she went inside the campus to complain about some students teasing her. The girl was on her way to Jamia in an autorickshaw when some students passed lewd comments at her.