November 8, 2017

Teenager believed that the crime would delay exams & parent-teacher meeting!

One week after Pradyuman Thakur had died at school in Gurgaon, the police cited CCTV footage to assert its claim that a bus conductor was the murderer.

The video wasn’t publicly released but seen by some reporters, showed Pradyuman, 7, crawling out of the school’s bathroom seconds after his throat had been slit. He collapsed near a wall outside, his blood puddling around him. The same camera had recorded the bus conductor – Ashok Kumar, entering the bathroom before the child went in.

He emerges first & the child follows, holding his neck. Child’s windpipe had been slashed open. He died within minutes.

Today, the CBI said that the CCTV footage that the police referred to was just a part of the available video. Sources in the premier investigating agency, which took over the case last month, say that the Gurgaon police committed numerous errors. Among them, the fact that the extended video shows 5 people outside the bathroom – injured Pradyuman, 3 students & the bus conductor.

The CBI says that in that group was a Class 11 student who’s now considered the main suspect & was taken into detention last night. The same student reportedly had called out to a school gardener to alert him to a bleeding Pradyuman. The conductor who got later arrested helped carry child’s body to a car which rushed him to hospital (though he was dead by then).

The Gurgaon Police said that Ashok Kumar, the conductor, who was employed by a private firm that operated schoolbuses, had used a knife from his toolkit to slit open Pradyuman’s neck when he resisted sexual assault in the bathroom. The police also claimed that conductor had confessed to the killing.

The CBI says that a search of the washroom led to a knife that had been flushed down a pot & that the Class 11 student had been seen with the same knife in school before the murder took place. The student also allegedly told classmates that their exams would be postponed. CBI sources say the teenager was in counselling & academically week & that he believed the crime would delay exams & a parent-teacher meeting.

A CBI spokesperson said that while the student had planned a murder, he had “not identified the target” & chose Prayudman upon encountering him in the toilet.

His father has denied the accusations, stating that the teen “had not one spot of blood on his clothes” and is being framed. Ashok Kumar’s family says the same.

Pradyuman’s father, Vikram Thakur, said that he never believed the Gurgaon police’s theory about the conductor and feels the CBI has cracked the case.