Nehru Nagar in Kurla (East), located in Mumbai’s eastern suburb. Nehru Nagar in Kurla (East), located in Mumbai’s eastern suburb.

It was the June of 2010. A disheartened Dilip Sawant, DCP with Mumbai Police (Zone 6), stood atop a railway bridge watching as waves after waves of people got off Mumbai locals, and headed home to the lower middle-class neighbourhood of Nehru Nagar in Kurla (East), located in Mumbai’s eastern suburb.

To him, the scene that he remembers vividly to this day, accentuated the hopelessness of his task. Amongst the oblivious teeming masses of a city perpetually in a hurry, he was looking for one ‘serial killer’. Possibly, two.

Three girls aged between five and nine had been raped and murdered in the Nehru Nagar area within four months of each other in 2010. The first to die was a five-year-old, whose body was found in a gunny bag on the staircase of a building in the Vatsala Tai Nagar area of Nehru Nagar on February 9. Soon after, a second body turned up on the terrace of the police quarters located opposite the Nehru Nagar Police Station, that was investigating the case. Then Maharashtra home minister R R Patil directed police that he “wanted the pervert nabbed”.

Such was the panic, Sawant says, that if a girl got even half an hour late reaching home, parents raised an alarm. He recalls TV vans rushing in. “This was the only case talked about across the city.”

Under tremendous pressure, police checked mental hospitals for missing inmates, picked up history-sheeters, tapped into informer networks, and gave postmen sketches of wanted accused that they would take to every house they went to. When nothing worked, police turned to science.

Over the next few months, the Maharashtra Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) conducted DNA tests on 500 ‘suspects’ — the list including people with a history of sexual offences in and around Kurla — with each test costing Rs 5,000. A senior officer overseeing the probe says the list included the son of a senior officer investigating the case who lived in the police quarters where the second girl was found. The son was believed to have a drug addiction. “We were not taking any chances,” the officer says.

While the tests did not lead police to the killer, they did reveal something else: there were two people involved in the three cases.

The DNA extracted from the semen samples taken from the vaginal swabs of the first two girls killed and from the hair found near their bodies matched each other. The third did not. “Someone else carried out the third crime in a similar manner,” Sawant says.

Eventually, it was the third case police would crack first. Police said the alien DNA in this case matched that of a local cable operator, Javed Shaikh (19). Arrested on July 1, 2010, Shaikh was sentenced to life term in September 2015.

The first two cases, handed over to the Maharashtra Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in 2012, would gradually be filed away as one of those ‘stubborn’ cases that remained unsolved.

Till, the sexual assaults began again.

***

In the first half of 2017, nearly 20 km from Kurla and seven years after the Nehru Nagar rapes and murders, a series of minor girls were sexually assaulted across Navi Mumbai, Mumbai’s satellite city.

“The accounts of most girls, who were between 8 and 12 years of age, were similar. A man approached them claiming their father had sent him, took them to terraces of under-construction buildings and, after finding an isolated spot, told them there was a worm on their dress that could cause cancer and jumped away, recoiling. The girls said he told them to remove their clothes and, when they did, he sexually assaulted them,” says DCP, Navi Mumbai (Crime Branch), Tushar Doshi.

A CCTV grab from a 2017 crime scene linked to Rehan Qureshi. A CCTV grab from a 2017 crime scene linked to Rehan Qureshi.

This time, police had CCTV grabs of the suspect, wearing a blue T-shirt and almost constantly on his phone.

After there was massive police deployment across Navi Mumbai, there was a lull between May and August 2017, when there was another assault, and a man matching the one in the CCTV images was seen around the scene of the crime. “We counted around 13 offences where he was suspected to be involved by then,” says ACP Ajay Kadam, Navi Mumbai Crime Branch.

On September 13 came report of another assault, this time from Nallasopara, over 50 km away. Maharashtra DGP D Padsalgikar set up a joint team of Navi Mumbai, Mumbai and Thane police to investigate.

A Crime Branch officer says that by then they had over 500 hours of footage of the suspect, gathered from several spots. “His peculiar gait, where he moved his right hand while his left part remained stiff and the slight jerk with every new step…,” describes Inspector Shirish Pawar of the Anti-Extortion Cell. Police also picked up another curious detail. While the suspect seemed to be always on the phone, they could not find any leads in the phone records of the areas where he had been seen.

When, despite the high alert, the suspect struck again on September 22, a meeting was held, attended by all senior officers. “We came around to three opinions: he seemed to be dressed like a salesman, he just pretended to talk on the phone, and most importantly, he always took the exit headed towards Mira Road,” says Sanjay Kumar, Navi Mumbai Police Commissioner.

Police went looking to Mira Road, a suburb located to the north of Mumbai, next. When ads in Marathi newspapers with photographs of the accused didn’t yield any result, they felt this lead might be a dead end, that the suspect probably didn’t stay in Mira Road, or even in an area where people read Marathi newspapers.

DCP Doshi says they then decided to give Naya Nagar area in Mira Road another shot, as the locality mostly has non-Marathi residents. “In the past, most cases had taken place on a Wednesday or Thursday, and hence a joint police team roamed around the area in plainclothes on September 26, a Wednesday. One of our officers spotted a man looking similar to one in the CCTV images. We asked him his name. He said he was Rehan Qureshi.”

Among those officers closely watching the Mira Road episode was Sanjay Kumar, who had taken charge as Navi Mumbai Police Commissioner on August 1. During his stint in the CID, the Nehru Nagar murders had come to his table, and like other officers had done, Kumar had relegated this one to his diary of unsolved cases.

When Qureshi was brought before Kumar, he vociferously denied his involvement in the sexual assaults. “I asked him to walk a few steps in my direction. There was a slight jerk with every step and a tilt to the right,” Kumar recalls.

The police team informed the officer that while they had found that Qureshi’s family had stayed at six places in and around the city since his birth, Rehan mentioned only five. Kumar asked which place Qureshi had left out. It was Nehru Nagar.

Qureshi’s blood sample was sent to the FSL, to be checked against the Nehru Nagar samples, that had remained unmatched after 880 DNA tests costing Rs 40-odd lakh.

“Test No. 881 was a match,” smiles an FSL official.

***

The hunt moved on to another puzzle: why did Qureshi do what he allegedly did?

As per the biodata submitted by Qureshi to Fit Well Fixtures in the Kalbadevi area of South Mumbai, where he was employed in April this year as a hardware salesman but fired within three months, the 34-year-old did his schooling from St Paul High School in Parel and higher secondary from Maharishi Dayanand College, scoring 65 per cent. A fluent English speaker, he later did a course from the Joseph Cardijn Technical Institute as a fitter in 2013. He claims to have worked at several engineering companies in Mumbai.

Qureshi’s career graph also showed that in 2010, a month after the third rape and killing in Nehru Nagar, he had moved to Dammam in Saudi Arabia for a year. After he returned, the family had moved out of Nehru Nagar.

Vishal Shah of Fit Well Fixtures says they fired Qureshi in June due to “inefficiency”. “He was not able to do sales. Whenever we called him, he would not answer the phone. There was no point paying someone Rs 22,000 if they could not produce results.”

Shah also claims that even in that limited interaction with Qureshi, he suspected something “amiss”.

A relative says that after he was fired, Qureshi had started doing data entry work at home. “He wanted to set up a hardware unit in Mira Road and was looking for finance. Recently he claimed to have received some offers.”

Police say that Qureshi has confessed to the crimes, including revealing why he chose under-construction buildings. Every morning, he would allegedly leave his Mira Road residence to visit the buildings to try sell hardware tools. “He would get off at a random railway station, start roaming around and fish out a mobile phone. While he pretended to be listening, he was actually watching. Trying to zero in on the next victim… No one suspects a person talking on the phone… it is assumed he is focused on the conversation. It was his getaway,” Doshi says.

On how he escaped the Nehru Nagar DNA sweep, police say Qureshi told them he had stayed confined to his home. “I never stepped out except for work. Police had been questioning people mostly on the roads, or those with past records, they could not go door to door,” an officer recalls him saying.

***

As they piece together Qureshi’s journey, an officer says they believe that like Javed Shaikh, who is serving time for the third rape and murder in Nehru Nagar, Qureshi had got mixed up “with the wrong kind of people”.

Sawant says that near the tracks in the Nehru Nagar area where Qureshi lived, drug addicts would often hang around consuming intoxicants and watching porn. “Qureshi fell into their company.”

According to Doshi, Qureshi also claims that he lost his senses once he had zeroed in on a victim, “just taking her to the nearest isolated building he could find”. He allegedly claims he didn’t even realise he had dumped one of the bodies in the police quarters.

Qureshi has reportedly also confessed that he never intended to kill any of his “victims”, and that he had ended up murdering the first two in “panic”. Later, he has reportedly told police, he realised the murders drew too much attention, and so he decided to let the girls go.

ACP Kadam claims Qureshi has not shown any emotional response during questioning, accepting his “guilt” with a deadpan expression once confronted with CCTV evidence. “Haan sab, woh maine hee kiya hai… Galti ho gaya (Yes, I did all that… I made a mistake)’, he says,” according to Kadam.

Doshi adds that in police custody, Qureshi hardly interacts, seeming lost in his thoughts. “Late into the night, he is still awake in his cell.”

In their investigations, police have also found summons against Qureshi for a case registered at the Taloja Police Station. “We found that he had been arrested in 2015 on a molestation charge and released on bail a few months later,” an officer says.

***

Qureshi’s family, including his mother and four brothers (two of them elder to him), live together in a predominantly Muslim locality in Naya Nagar. Qureshi’s father died in Uttar Pradesh during a robbery in 1996. A close relative says the family had a tough time recovering from the incident, financially and emotionally. Since Qureshi’s arrest, neighbours are putting pressure on the family to vacate the house.

Alleging that he has been framed, Qureshi’s family members say there has been a media trial in the case since day one, with police holding a press conference soon after his arrest. On October 25, when Qureshi was produced before a Thane court, his lawyer Adil Khatri accused police of misleading family members by not telling them which jail Qureshi had been kept in.

Qureshi’s mother says they are waiting for the right time to speak. Adds a relative, “The mother, who sells clothes from a stall, brought up her five sons with lot of struggle, ensuring they were all educated. The eldest son is settled in Dubai, and the family planned to get Rehan married along with him. But the marriage got delayed due to some ailment.”

The parents of the two girls who were allegedly Qureshi’s first victims say they came to know of his arrest only when TV channels contacted them. Police say they were waiting for the CID to contact them as the case is with it now.

Relieved that her daughter’s alleged killer may be finally brought to justice, the mother of the nine-year-old whose body was found on a terrace in the police quarters says, “In addition to the trauma of losing my daughter, I had to confront whispers in the neighbourhood about how we were bad parents for letting our daughter out alone.”

Despite relatives telling her to forget about it all “for own peace of mind”, the mother says, “Every year, a new policeman assigned to the case would come to record our statement, and I would be hopeful again.”

The father of the first victim, who sells footwear, says he too clung on to hope through frequent visits to the police station.

***

Should DCP Sawant stand on the railway bridge at Nehru Nagar today, instead of a row of shops selling knick-knacks, he would see a high rise, with a shopping complex in the bottom half and houses above. All across Nehru Nagar’s 5.25-sq km area, with a population of over 7.5 lakh — mainly migrant labourers from Rajasthan, a Muslim concentration from North India and a Dalit settlement near the railway station — high rises are being constructed.

But, says Sawant, seated in his fourth-floor office at the new Mumbai Police Commissionerate building in South Mumbai, he is haunted by those days. “I would come home and see my daughter who was the same age group as the girls being killed. Girls were being raped and murdered and I was not able to do anything. Every time my mobile phone rang, I was scared what news awaited me. It was difficult to sleep at night. Those were bad days.”

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