Picture used for representational purpose only

DEHRADUN: The brutal hacking of Vasu Yadav, a 12-year-old boarding school student, with cricket bats and wickets by his seniors has numbed the education fraternity in Dehradun , coming as it does barely a few months after the gangrape of a minor girl in another boarding school here.

On Wednesday, a day after the crime was reported, more sordid details regarding the case emerged. According to police, the management of the school, which has around 400 students, in a bid to hush up the matter had hurriedly buried the boy’s body inside the school campus soon after doctors declared him dead.

There was also delay in taking the boy to the hospital after his seniors, both class XII students of the same school who are about 19 years old, beat him brutally in a class room, allegedly tortured him and then pored cold water on him because they blamed him for stealing a packet of biscuit while the students were on an outing, leading to the school administration cancelling permission of all students to leave the campus. After the beating, the boy passed away and remained in the class room for the next few hours till he was found by the hostel warden late in the evening.

Senior superintendent of police (SSP) Dehradun Nivedita Kukreti told TOI that there were several lapses on the school’s part. “Not only was the boy taken very late to hospital that led to his death, the staff members also tried to hide the incident and did not report it to police. He was beaten up in phases in the afternoon, while he was taken to hospital in late evening,” the officer said.

Usha Negi, chairperson of the Uttarakhand State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, whose intervention in the case led to the matter coming to light, said that that all possible attempts seemed to have been done to cover up the incident. "The incident took place on March 10 and we were informed about it on March 11 following which we visited the school. However, when we got there, we found that the school administration had buried the body within the campus without even conducting the post-mortem. It was only after our intervention that the police exhumed the body and conducted the postmortem.” She added that “they didn't even bother to inform the parents, who live in Hapur , that their child had died”.

The two boys involved in the crime have been booked under section 302 (murder), while a case has also been registered against three staff members— the hostel manager, warden and sports teacher—under section 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) of Indian Penal Code (IPC).



In Video: Shocking! School in Dehradun buries boy’s body to hush up murder