NEW DELHI: Only 8 years back, an average-looking young man named Ravinder Kumar, with a height just a couple of inches above 5 feet, became the most heinous, sadistic and merciless criminal in the history of Delhi.
His sordid crimes are now engraved in the minds of the people of the city. Kumar, aged 23 in 2015, was arrested for the first time for raping a 6-year-old girl. On May 25, 2023, he was finally convicted for kidnapping, raping and murdering that child and sentenced to life imprisonment till natural death. Not only the minor girl, the predator is accused of raping and murdering 54 children, including boys, between 2008 and 2015.
A Rohini court judge who pronounced the verdict on Thursday said that the accused does not deserve any leniency on any account. But how did such a dreaded paedophile land into the police net?
Jagminder Singh Dahiya, who retired as Assistant Commissioner of Police in 2015, told this newspaper that the habit of watching English and porn movies, plus his addiction to drugs made him lose his humanity within no time. Kumar was 18 when he came to Delhi from Kasganj in Uttar Pradesh in search of work.
After working for the whole day as a labourer, he used to consume drugs at night and then after getting heavily intoxicated, he used to go out on a walk to search for his prey. Be it a boy or girl, he lured the children with some money and chocolates and took them to some isolated place.
There he used to first rape them and then strangulate them to death with his bare hands. In one of the cases, the human-turned-monster Ravinder first sodomized a boy, slit his throat with a blade and then threw him in a dry gutter.
As there was no water and only sand, the victim boy’s blood stopped from oozing out of his throat and miraculously his life was saved by a beat constable who was on patrolling duty. Gradually, Ravinder developed this horrific routine and in a period of 7 years, he is accused of raping and murdering 54 children aged between 6 and 12 years. However, so far he is only convicted in three cases while the police had registered FIR in 30 cases.
Moving on, in 2014, Ravinder used to work as a helper under a person named Sunny. Sunny was his friend but ultimately became the key witness in his case, rather it was the incident with Sunny that ultimately helped the police to find out the perpetrator. Actually, Sunny had allegedly developed an illicit affair with Ravinder’s mother which the latter found out and ultimately decided to eliminate him.
