Four-year-old’s Murder: My son has given his life to save other Shimla children, says father

The police were led to the tank by one of the accused, Vikrant Bakshi, who was arrested the day before the discovery.

Two others have also been arrested. Chander Sharma, whom the police claims to be the mastermind behind the kidnapping and murder, and Tajender Singh, who has a police record as a petty thief and Bakshi, college dropout, have confessed to the crime, the police said.

Investigators said the three have told the police that the boy was alive but unconscious when they dumped him in the tank after force-feeding him with liquor.

“I want police to hand them (accused) over to me just for 30 minutes. I will strip them in public, and do exactly the way they did gruesomely to my child before he was dumped alive in the water tank after being forced fed with liquor for six days,’ Gupta said while sitting at dharna outside the Shimla DC’s office Sunday.

The discovery of the boy’s remains has not just plunged the Gupta family in grief and anger, it has also convulsed Shimla like never before. The hill town has rarely witnessed such a gruesome crime. Enraged residents have taken out daily protest marches demanding to know why the police took so long to crack the case. There was a candlelight vigil Saturday. Mobs have attacked the accused twice in the last three days when they were being produced in court.

“In zalim darindon ne mare bete ko maar dala (These barbarian and cruel people killed my son),” Gupta cried out. The businessman, who deals in tobacco products, has had two heart surgeries since his son went missing. One surgery was in July this year.

Yug was kidnapped near Gupta’s Rambazar home, close to the home of the main accused Chander Sharma. Police said Sharma had lured the child to his house offering him chocolates. Police said the child was forced to drink liquor, which knocked him out, packed in a box and carried in a vehicle to a house, which Tajender Singh, another key accused, had hired near Ram Chandra Chowk .

Police said according to their statements, the boy was alive when they dumped him in the tank.

“Chander Sharma revealed that if the child was sent back, he would disclose his identity. So it was better to eliminate the child since they had starved and tortured him, and forced him to drink liquor. They also made a video footage in a mobile phone and wrote a letter seeking ransom from the family,’ said a police officer associated with investigations.

But Yug’s father says the accused had already killed the boy before a letter for ransom demanding the curiously exact amount of Rs 3.62 crore was received at his shop at Rambazar on June 27, the boy’s second birthday.

“The letter demanded that the ransom money be sent to Ambala with our domestic worker Hari the next day, which we could not do,” he recalled.

All the while, Gupta said, Chander Sharma pretended to be a good neighbour and a human rights activist boasting of his links to powerful people. Sharma even went everywhere with Gupta during this period including to the police station to lodge an FIR after the child did not return home even the next day.

During the next two months, the family received three more letters, the last one threatening to kidnap and murder Gupta’s daughters — Tisha and Bhumi, now class ninth and sixth students at the local Dayanand School. “We lived in terror fearing my daughters would be harmed. By this time, we had started suspecting Sharma’s activities and told the police. Nobody took me seriously. He use to track every single movement of my family, and would question domestic workers about any updates on Yug, and also about Gupta’s business,” said Gupta.

When Shimla police remained clueless till August-September 2014, the case was transferred to the CID.

In 2015, all three accused were arrested, in a mobile theft case, but were out on bail soon. “We recovered stolen mobiles, which were kept as a case property,” recalls D W Negi, SP, Shimla.

The real story began to unfold only in June-July 2016, when CID teams started tracking and analysing the phone details of residents in Rambazar area. The accused were also arrested and were sent to Ahmedabad for narco-analysis.

“They opposed the CID move and even managed to skip the test on medical grounds and were also released on bail soon,” said Gupta.

However, when CID took possession of the mobile phones seized by the Shimla police in 2015 and sent these for analysis to State Forensic Lab (SFL), a picture of a child with his hands tied was retrieved from the deleted data of one phone that belonged to Vikrant Bakshi. This, alongwith CDRs of other phones, pin-pointed the presence of all three accused at the rented house. Vikrant Bakshi was the first to be arrested, a day before recovery of skeleton, and he led the CID to solving the entire case.

Vinod Dhawan, DIG (CID), who led the investigations in the past two years, says, “We have now taken permission of the court to send all three for narco-analysis test on September 6 to further strengthen the case.”

“My son has given his life to save other Shimla children from these men, had they not been caught,” said a tearful Gupta.