BHOPAL: A paedophile who was jailed once for raping a child, sentenced to death for raping a second child, and then acquitted by Madhya Pradesh high court, has been arrested for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old hearing and speech impaired girl in MP’s Narsinghgarh town.
The suspect, 40-year-old Ramesh Khati, was caught after a 16-day hunt. Police questioned over 400 suspects, scanned more than 400 hours of CCTV footage, scoured nine districts and 17 railway stations, until they located him in Prayagraj and then tracked him to the MP-Rajasthan border where he was arrested on Wednesday.
The child had gone missing from home on the night of Feb 1 and was found the next morning in the jungles of Sanjay Nagar, just behind Narsinghgarh rest house, covered in blood. Strangely, her family members did not go to police and it was an Anganwadi worker who alerted cops two days later on seeing blood on her clothes. She was brought to Bhopal, 90km away, and was on ventilator for six days but couldn’t be saved.
The brutality of the crime had shocked even seasoned police officers. Rajgarh SP Aditya Mishra led the investigation and was with the child in hospital for two days, hoping she would survive. It was police officers who lit her pyre, not family members.
CCTV helped arrest rape-murder suspect
The girl’s father and grandfather died long ago. She lived with her grandmother, an aunt, and an uncle, who is also terminally ill.
Determined to find her killer, the SP set up a 20-member SIT and followed every lead.
“We did everything we could. Every person who was in the area that day was questioned. Every CCTV footage was reviewed. In one CCTV clip, we saw a man trying to assault a mentally unstable woman a few hours before the child’s rape. We tracked him via CCTV footage, and saw that he had come to Narsinghgarh in an autorickshaw. The auto was traced to Biaora (35km away), and eventually, we zeroed in on Shahajpur (115km from Narsinghgarh),” SP Mishra told TOI.
Locating him proved even more challenging. “He was not at home. We learnt he could be in Ujjain. There, we came to know that he might be in Prayagraj. We scanned all the CCTV footage we could get, and found that he had left Prayagraj by train. We placed police teams at every railway station where the train halts. He was rounded up near the MP-Rajasthan border,” the SP added.
“He was questioned, like the other 400-odd people we interviewed. He gave some suspicious replies, and on further questioning, he admitted to committing the crime,” SP Mishra said.
The accused was produced in court on Wednesday, which remanded him in police custody for three days.
Police dug into Ramesh Khati’s background and found he was a habitual offender. He had served a 10-year jail term for raping a minor, got out in 2013, and raped an eight-year-old girl in Ashta of Sehore on Jan 1, 2014.
On June 18, 2015, an Ashta court sentenced him to death under IPC section 376E, which states that a person convicted of a rape for a second time or more can be sentenced to life in prison or death.
He challenged the verdict in high court and was acquitted on March 3, 2016. HC said that the prosecution had failed to establish Ramesh’s guilt. The state moved Supreme Court against his acquittal, where the case is on.
(The victim’s identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme court directives on cases related to sexual assault)
