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Call from stolen phone nailed teen

New Delhi: A 17-year-old boy, released from a juvenile home for “good behaviour” just two months after he had kidnapped and killed a child last September, has now been accused of murdering an elderly woman who was found dead in her home in south Delhi’s B K Dutt Colony on Monday.Police said the juvenile strangled 65-year-old Mithilesh Jain, a retired Military Engineering Services officer, before robbing the house of gold jewellery, two mobile phones, an iPad and some cash.The crime comes barely five months after the killer teen, along with his girlfriend, had abducted a child and later killed him because his father failed to pay a ransom of Rs 60,000. The accused, son of an electrician, had wanted to fund his entry into a popular dance reality show on television.The juvenile’s obsession with the TV show also led him to commit Monday’s robbery-cum-murder, police said.He managed to convince Jain to open the door of the house, pretending he was looking for a friend. He touched her feet and asked for water. He followed the woman as she went into the house to get the water and strangled her with his hands, police said.A first sight, Jain appeared to have died of natural causes. However, police swung into action when the autopsy said the woman had died of strangulation.The case was cracked after cops trailed a call the teenager made on Wednesday from one of the mobile phones he had taken from the house. Police picked him up from Faridabad and recovered the phones from him.TOI had reported on Thursday that police had begun to probe the homicide angle after registering a murder case. “We had formed a team led by ACP (operations) Rajender Singh and inspector (special staff) K P Malik to solve the case. All available evidence was analysed and the sequence of events recreated,” said DCP (south) Prem Nath.The 17-year-old was earlier apprehended on September 25, after he and his girlfriend had abducted a 13-year-old boy from Badarpur and murdered him in Uttarakhand. On November 21, he was released on grounds of good conduct after signing a bond.Jain’s body was found on Tuesday morning by a household help, Bhuvesh, who had gone to ask for the keys to her son-in-law’s office on the third floor of the building.The juvenile’s father is an electrician and owns a shop in B K Dutt Colony. The family earlier lived in a slum at Alibagh, near woman’s house, but were displaced to Faridabad during the Commonwealth Games.Parents of the youth say that he was obsessed with the idea of becoming a dancing star and had even stolen money from their house to pay for dance competitions. The juvenile had apparently made it to the first round of the reality show on a previous occasion. He had met a man who promised to take him through the second round if he could arrange Rs 40,000, the family said.