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By Aishwarya Dakhore: A usual night for Ravinder Kumar, a daily-wage laborer working in Delhi, would involve an hours-long spree of hunting for young children every night. He would walk miles through the slums of Delhi like a madman until he spotted a young child that he would kidnap, rape and kill in a heinous way. He did this repeatedly with over 30 children for about six years.
He confessed to being guilty of at least 38 cases of rape and murder of minor children across Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, committed between 2008 and 2015. Some of these were also cases of necrophilia. After six years of committing the heinous crimes and a trial that lasted eight years, he was convicted on Saturday by a Delhi court.
With an underprivileged, rural background, Ravinder Kumar came to Delhi from Uttar Pradesh’s Kasganj in search of employment as an 18-year-old boy in 2008. He found a source of income soon enough, though he started wasting his money consuming alcohol and drugs. It took him no time to turn into an addict.
A young Ravinder Kumar would return every day from work to his shanty in the slums of Delhi and spend hours getting drunk and high on drugs. On one such nights, he stumbled upon a pornographic horror movie – another addiction that would soon turn him into a dangerous serial killer and rapist. He developed strong criminal tendencies as he continued getting intoxicated and watching similar kind of movies every night.
In 2008, Ravinder committed the first of a series of crimes wherein he kidnapped a young girl from the Karla area in Delhi. He raped her in an intoxicated state, and then killed her. He escaped the crime without getting caught the first time, which motivated him to do it for the second time and then the third, with no turning back. Ravinder Kumar subsequently turned into a honed criminal.
ALSO READ | Delhi: Man walked 40 km in search of children to rape, kill them; convicted
He started developing a pattern in the rapes and murders he committed over years to come. He would specifically target children from underprivileged, poor backgrounds, whose disappearances, he presumed, were more likely to go unnoticed. He would use either money or candies to lure them, and then take them to abandoned or deserted areas to execute his plans. At times, when the victim was difficult to control, he would first murder and then rape the child, according to a news report.
His youngest victim was reportedly two years old, while the oldest was 12 years old. The most he has walked through night to hunt for a prey is 40 kilometres.
Ravinder Kumar first caught the police’s eye in 2015 for murder attempt and abuse of a six-year-old. Former ACP Jagminder Singh Dahiya, who probed the case as an inspector posted at Begumpur police station then, told TOI that Ravinder Kumar had narrated each of his crimes in detail during interrogation. He also took the police through at least 15 locations where he committed the crimes. Dahiya also confirmed that Ravinder Kumar was a necrophiliac and a paedophile.
“Many of the victims were from rural areas and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. That’s why he managed to operate for so long,” Jagminder Singh Dahiya told a media outlet. The police reportedly tried to investigate deaths that Ravinder Kumar claimed to have committed without getting caught.
According to a news report, the investigation revealed lapses in several cases where FIRs were registered but not under the Sections of highest relevance, which hampered the probe’s progress and the culprit was never found.
The Rohini court convicted Ravinder Kumar on Saturday in the case filed against him in 2015, even as his confessions to several murders made the case against him stronger. The court will decide the quantum of punishment in the next couple of weeks.
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