LUDHIANA: A 16-year-old boy from Ludhiana has been detained for killing a nine-year-old boy, chopping his body into six pieces, eating the flesh and drinking the blood. Deepu Kumar had gone missing on Monday. His beheaded body was found the next day, dumped in a vacant plot in the city’s Dugri area.
Both the accused and the victim are children of migrant labourers living in the same lane. Police said that after killing the boy, the accused, who is a class VIII student, came home and behaved normally. He even cooked food for his father as his mother was away in Chandigarh with his elder brother.
The case was cracked after police examined CCTV footage from the area and sawDeepu with the teenager. Police then detained the accused, who later confessed to killing the boy and also eating the boy’s flesh.
Deputy commissioner of police Bhupinder Singh said, “This is a case of cannibalism as the boy craves for human flesh. He told us that he would often want to eat raw chicken. At times he even craved to eat his own limbs, he said.”
Officials have taken the boy for medical and psychological tests.
The boy told police that around 1.40 pm on Monday, he took Deepu home on the pretext of giving him some kite string. At the time, their parents were at work. The accused first strangled Deepu and then cut him into pieces with a sharp gardening tool inside the bathroom after removing his clothes. Later, he put the body parts in polybags and carried them on his bicycle to dump them. He extracted the boy’s heart and threw it in his school campus. He said he hated his teachers and wanted the school to get a bad name. Police recovered the heart under a water tank.
