A man who used to dig up bodies of recently deceased women and defile them was arrested from a graveyard in Paposh Nagar on Saturday. The suspected necrophiliac, the caretaker of the graveyard, was responsible for watering the graves.
According to complaints received by the police, some people had been dishonouring corpses of recently buried women. A police officer at the Nazimabad police station said the detainee has admitted raping at least 48 dead women in the past few months. Police have registered the First Information Report against the suspect.
The police officer said, “We are speechless. This sort of case is a first for us.” The man has confessed his crimes, and the police are in the process of investigating the matter, he added. Police said they were suspicious that something strange was going on at the Paposh Nagar graveyard.
Locals had also complained about dug graves appearing suddenly in the past couple of months. Neighbours started keeping vigil on the activities of the people visiting the graveyard, the law enforcers said. “Then we received a phone call from one of the neighbours who said he had witnessed a lot of activity in the graveyard,” police said.
They said, “According to the neighbour, hardly anybody was present at the graveyard at that time and yet there was a lot of commotion. We sent a police party with a mobile unit to the site and caught the man in the act.” A case has been registered in the name of Riaz, son of Sher Alam, under Sections 297, 354, 376 and 377.
A small packet containing five grams of hashish was also recovered from the accused man. Another case has also been registered under Section 6/9 B, the police added.
Necrophilia is when an individual achieves sexual gratification by viewing or having intercourse with a corpse. This type of behaviour is very rare and usually men engage in this activity. These men usually suffer severe emotional disorders and are very hateful and frightened towards women.
Also called thanatophilia or necrolagnia, necrophilia is classified as a paraphilia by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The word is artificially derived from the ancient Greek words nekros (dead) and philia (love). The term appears to have originated from Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 work ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’.
A ten-tier classification of necrophilia:
» Role players
» Romantic necrophiles
» People having a necrophilic fantasy (necrophilic fantasisers)
» Tactile necrophiles
» People having a sexual fetish for the dead (fetishistic necrophiles)
» People having a necromutilomania (necromutilomaniacs)
» Opportunistic necrophiles
» Regular necrophiles
» Homicidal necrophiles
» Exclusive necrophiles