HYDERABAD: Khader Bagh, otherwise a sleepy neighbourhood, was seething with anger on Wednesday morning. Residents poured out on the lanes and encircled the lone police official who was trying to pacify them. They threatened to block the Shankarapalli-Hyderabad road until justice is delivered. In a makeshift tent nearby they had laid a small frail body of a 12-year-old boy, wrapped in white and shrouded in ittar. While police officials kept guard, neighbours and friends paid last respects.Just a stone’s throw from his house, the boy was allegedly sodomised and murdered by his 17-year-old friend.
“Three days back, the accused had threatened my son saying he would kill him,” said the dead boy’s father. Langerhouz police have arrested the accused a case under the controversial Section 377 and Section 302 of IPC has been filed on him and three others. The boy’s body was first identified by none other than his father, at around 6 pm inside a flour mill near their house. He had head injuries and there was a rubber pipe tied around his neck. “He was wearing only a kurta and was naked waist-down,” Afroz wrote in his police complaint indicating he was sexually assaulted.
When enquired, the father found out that his son had not been to the Madrasa at MD Lines that entire day.
“The in-charge at the Madrasa said he hasn’t come there for the last two days,” the father said. While returning from the Madrasa, he found people gathered at a plot that earlier housed the Andhra Flour Mill and found his son dead there.
Meanwhile, police continued to be hounded by the agitated crowd that demanded post-mortem report of the victim. “We will have something concrete by Thursday,” said SHO C Anjaiah. “We have four people in our remand and it takes time to interrogate them.”