NEW DELHI: The breakthrough came from a father’s fractured memory: a white car, a yellow commercial plate, vanishing into the night with his young daughter. It was a slender thread, but enough for the investigators to launch a manhunt across city limits.According to police, the suspect, Basu Kumar Singh, a driver linked to three major cab aggregators, had meticulously planned his disappearance. On the night of the assault, he initially drove his cab to the pickup location for a routine booking. Then he spotted the girl in Chhatarpur area. Changing his mind in an instant, he allegedly stalked her silently from his vehicle for 45 minutes.After the assault, Singh switched off his mobile phone for some time to vanish from the grid, cops said. While he assumed he had managed to get away with the crime, his vehicle’s digital footprint finally gave him away.
To nab the suspect, joint CP Vijay Kumar formed nine teams. Supervised by DCP Anant Mittal, the teams swarmed the tech landscape, pivoting when the suspect’s phone went dead. Scanning CCTV cameras near the spot where the child was kidnapped, investigators spotted a faint, grainy shadow of a car idling in the darkness. Police contacted the cab aggregators to check the latitude and longitude data for all registered vehicles in that specific quadrant at the given time. Footage from 70 other cameras was also analysed, helping cops construct an electronic route of the suspect’s car.The data dump from the aggregators provided the missing piece of the puzzle. By cross-referencing the GPS coordinates with the timestamps on the CCTV footage, a team of 15 cops led by Mehrauli SHO Ritesh Sharma zeroed in on the white cab. After the crime, the suspect also switched on his phone to accept a ride, which helped cops track his location.But though the net was tightening, the clock was ticking on the girl’s life. Cops tracked down and interrogated the suspect’s brother in Gurgaon. By midday, the teamwork of technology and boots on the ground paid off: the vehicle was traced to west Delhi’s Vikaspuri and the driver cornered. The arrest was swift, executed in about seven hours after the PCR call was received at 5am.
During interrogation, the suspect tried to mislead the cops by changing versions. Later, he confessed to raping and killing the girl. A search then began for her body, and acting on leads provided by the suspect, investigators traced it around 4.30pm Tuesday.The suspect was then taken to the spot for reconstruction of the crime scene, during which he allegedly tried to flee and was shot.A Bihar native, cops said Singh is known for his short temper and has four-five cases, including two of attempted murder, registered against him, which are now being probed. He had been working as a cab driver for the past 10 years and lived in a rented accommodation in Chakkarpur, Gurgaon. He is married and has two sons, aged four years and 30 months.Also read: Cabbie abducts, rapes and kills 10-year-old in Delhi; shot by cops during escape bid
