noida

Updated: Aug 08, 2018 09:26 IST

Ghaziabad police said that the 32-year-old cab driver, accused of sexually assaulting and murdering a five-year-old girl on the night of August 2 in Khoda, was drinking and watching porn videos when the child entered his room.

Police arrested Deepak Thakur, a native of Agra and a tenant of the girl’s family for the past one year. He allegedly raped the girl, a LKG student, on the night of August 2 and later smothered her to death as she started screaming for help.

The accused allegedly packed the body in a plastic bag and dumped it the same night over the roof of her uncle’s house in the neighbourhood.

“The accused has admitted that he murdered the girl after raping her. To mislead investigators, he visited the police station with the girl’s family when they went there to file a missing person complaint and also helped the family in their search a day later. He then fled the house leaving the doors open,” Vaibhav Krishna, SSP Ghaziabad, said.

According to the police, the man had returned from his in-laws’ house in Mainpuri on the morning of August 2 and, thereafter, cleaned his room and bought food in the evening.

Thakur said, “As I was having drinks, the girl arrived. I was watching porn on my mobile phone for nearly 40 minutes. I caught hold of her when she came to my room. Then I locked the room from inside and switched off the lights and assaulted her. When she started to scream, I smothered her by holding her mouth and nose till she fell unconscious.”

He said after regaining his senses, he put the body in a bag but it did not fit. He managed to stuff it in the bag and hid it in a loft near the stairs.

“I was afraid of what I had done and went to sleep. Around 11.30pm, her father came and asked me to lock the doors which I had left open. Later, there was a hue and cry over the missing girl and I decided to go to the police station with her family. Before that, I moved the bag to the roof of the adjacent house. The next day, I helped them make loudspeaker announcements in an auto,” he said.

Officials said Deepak was married three years ago and the couple has a son who turned one on August 4, the day the girl’s body was recovered. His wife and son were at her parents’ house in Mainpuri for the last two months.

“Deepak fled to Delhi on August 3 and continued driving his car for the cab aggregator. On August 4, when he came to know that his name had cropped up in the probe, he fled to Bulandshahr where he stayed with his friends but did not tell anyone about the incident,” the SSP said.

The police have also carried out extensive forensic examination of the scene of crime. The SSP said he also initiated an inquiry into the delay in conducting the postmortem. The autopsy was carried out on the night of August 4 as the documents had not arrived in time from the Khoda police station.

The police have arrested Deepak on charges of abduction, rape, murder, destruction of evidence and also under sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.