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Delhi Police Rearrest Devender Sharma, the Doctor Serving Life for Killing Drivers, Six Months After He Jumped Parole

The 62-year-old walked out of Jaipur's Central Jail on parole in January and never returned. Questioned after his arrest, he told police he had lost count of the murders after 50.

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AI-generated illustration, not the real place or event: a narrow lane on a city outskirts in hazy light, a police vehicle parked

For six months the man police call a serial killer had been living quietly on the edge of Delhi. Devender Kumar Sharma, 62, an Ayurvedic doctor serving life for murder, had walked out of Central Jail in Jaipur on 20 days' parole in January 2020 and never gone back. On Wednesday, July 29, Delhi Police announced that officers from its Crime Branch had found him in Baprola, in the west of the city, and arrested him the day before.

"Sharma was serving life sentence in Central Jail, Jaipur in a murder case and was out on parole for 20 days in January this year after spending 16 years in jail," said Rakesh Paweriya, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime). According to police, he hid for a while in his home village of Purreni, in Uttar Pradesh's Aligarh district, then moved to Delhi at the beginning of March. He stayed first with an acquaintance in Mohan Garden, then settled in Baprola, where he married again and went into the property business. Rajasthan wanted him for breaking parole under the state's Prisons Act, in a case registered at Lalkothi in Jaipur.

Sharma had trained in Ayurvedic medicine and opened a clinic in Jaipur in 1984. Police said his slide into crime began after he lost 11 lakh rupees in a gas dealership scheme that turned out to be a fraud. In 1995 he started a fake gas agency in Chhara village near Aligarh. Accomplices robbed trucks carrying cooking gas cylinders by killing the drivers, unloaded the cylinders at his agency and had the trucks broken up for parts in Meerut, police said. Later the same men hired taxis to Aligarh, killed the drivers at lonely spots and threw their bodies into the Hazara Canal at Kasganj, which is home to crocodiles. Some of the taxis, police said, he sold on for 20,000 to 25,000 rupees each.

He was arrested over several murders from 2002 to 2004 but convicted, the police officer said, in only six or seven cases, all kidnap-murders of taxi and truck drivers. Police also tied him to an interstate kidney transplant racket in Jaipur, Ballabhgarh and Gurgaon, and he was arrested with several other doctors in the Gurgaon kidney case in 2004. He claimed to have arranged more than 125 illegal transplants between 1994 and 2004, at 5 to 7 lakh rupees each.

His questioning ran from Tuesday into Wednesday morning. Police said he was calm and cooperative and volunteered details of his past crimes himself. When officers raised media reports that he might have been involved in more than 100 killings, he told them he had lost count after 50. Police said they could not confirm any figure, because the cases against him had been investigated separately in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan.

Jaipur police were told of the arrest, and he was to be handed back to them through the courts.

What was known on July 29, 2020. Sharma's convictions cover six or seven murder cases, by the police account given that day. The higher figures, "over 50" and "more than 100," come from his own statements under questioning and from earlier media reports, and no court has found them. Reports differ on the year he lost money in the gas dealership scheme, so this story does not give one. Accounts of the arrest, his life after the escape and his methods come from Delhi Police. His victims are not named in the reports cited here.

Sources

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