CUTTACK: Commissionerate police on Monday claimed to have cracked the gruesome murder of a 13-year-old boy whose body was found lying in a pool of blood with slit throat near a pond at Purbakachha village within Jagatpur police limits on December 17 morning and arrested the killer.
The 25-year-old accused identified as Jogendra Panda alias Babula of Purbakachha has reportedly confessed to having murdered the boy after the latter resisted his frequent attempts to sodomise him.
Briefing mediapersons, DCP Pinak Mishra said the deceased had been missing since December 16 morning. The boy had reportedly left home after his father Jagannath Behera, a mason, rebuked him for not focusing on his studies.
On December 17 morning, some locals found the boy’s body lying in a pool of blood with slit throat on the paddy field road leading to the village pond Chandan Pokahari and informed his family as well as police.
After the recovery of the body, the boy’s elder brother filed an FIR based on which a murder case was registered and an investigation carried out.
Police formed a special team headed by ACP-Zone-1 Arun Kumar Swain which verified the CCTV footage and also drew up a list of local antisocial elements, criminals and addicts.
During investigation, it came to light that the boy was killed on the rooftop of the cyclone shelter in the village and subsequently thrown near Chandan Pokhari.
“The special team then focused on the movement of the persons who used to congregate at the cyclone shelter for using intoxicants and started screening them. They found the accused Babula used to sit on the roof of the shelter for intoxication and had absconded from the locality after two days of the incident,” said Mishra.
After much effort, the accused who was hiding in a paddy field near Padmapur was apprehended on Sunday.
During interrogation, Babula confessed that he had befriended the boy last July and had been sodomising him by providing him biscuits and chocolates on the first floor of the abandoned cyclone shelter.
Babula had taken the boy to the cyclone shelter on December 16. However, the boy resisted and stated that he would disclose the matter to his father. Enraged, the accused assaulted the boy with a broken wooden door bottom. The boy fell down there and became unconscious. The accused then went to his house, brought a sickle and slit his throat.
He then shifted the dead body from the cyclone shelter to the road near Chandan Pokhari and abandoned it there, Mishra added.
The weapons of offence i.e. a wooden door bottom and the sickle have also been seized, informed the DCP.