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Delhi Police Say Ravinder Kumar Confessed to Killing More Than 30 Children

Arrested for the murder of a six-year-old in Begumpur, the 24-year-old laborer described attacks across outer Delhi going back to 2008, police said.

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A white police jeep parked in a wet, narrow lane between unfinished brick houses under monsoon clouds, with distant onlookers. Not the actual place.

The first child he admitted killing was never reported missing. She was the daughter of a laborer at a Delhi Metro construction site, and by his own account Ravinder Kumar was barely 17 when he took her to an isolated spot, assaulted her and killed her in 2008. No case was ever opened. On Tuesday, July 21, 2015, Delhi Police said that girl was the first of more than 30 children he now claimed to have raped and murdered.

Deputy Commissioner of Police Vikramjit Singh, who said he was monitoring the case himself, did not hide what the interrogation had done to him. "I am deeply shaken from inside," he told the IANS news agency. "I cannot express in words what all I am going through." Only days earlier police had put the likely toll at about 15. Now Singh said the investigation suggested it could reach 40.

Kumar, 24, came from Kasganj in Uttar Pradesh and lived in Delhi. Police had arrested him on July 16 for the rape and murder of a six-year-old girl in Begumpur, in outer Delhi, who had gone missing two days before. It was not his first arrest in Begumpur. The year before, police said, he had abducted a boy near his home there, cut his throat and left him for dead in a septic tank in a building under construction. The boy survived. Kumar was granted bail, because at the time no one knew what else he had done.

His account, as police described it, ran across seven years and much of the city's outer edge. A laborer's son kidnapped from Vijay Vihar in 2009 and strangled, in a case that was registered but collapsed for want of witnesses. Two crimes in Kanjhawala and Mundka in 2011. Two in Noida in 2013, when he worked as a cleaner for a transport contractor. He went through poor colonies in the afternoon or the early hours, Singh said, looking for children playing outside or near the toilets, and lured them with money and sweets; a child who refused was gagged and carried off. Police said he told them he killed 11 of his victims because they resisted or threatened to expose him, and that in rare cases he let a child go after a promise of silence.

On Monday, July 20, officers had taken him to Narela, Bawana and Alipur, places he had named under questioning, and Singh said those visits helped them establish the scale of what he described. Teams were now going back through five years of missing-child complaints in Vijay Nagar, Bawana, Narela, Alipur, Begumpur, Kanjhawala, Samaypur Badli and other neighborhoods to see which might belong to him.

Two days earlier the same officer had sounded more cautious. Police had the evidence to tie Kumar to the Begumpur girl's death, Singh said then, but checking his other claims could take a long time, because he gave only a broad time frame and did not know exactly where some of the attacks had happened.

What this story covers. Singh's statements of July 21, the toll estimates, the sites visited on July 20, the list of neighborhoods under review, the details of the 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2014 attacks and the July 16 arrest come from the IANS report of July 21, 2015, as published by Gulf News. His earlier remark about how long the investigation could take comes from The National's report of the same day. Everything here beyond the Begumpur case was, in July 2015, Kumar's confession as relayed by police, not a finding of any court. The children are not named because the reports opened for this story do not name them. The image is an illustration of an outer Delhi lane, not a place connected with the case.

Sources