Gonda boy arrested for murder in Shimla

LUCKNOW: The absconding IIT, Roorkee student from Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh -- wanted for the murder of a female student of IIT, Delhi in a hotel room in Shimla -- eventually landed in the police dragnet early on Sunday morning. Keeping the cops from five states on their toes for almost 24 hours, the 24-year-old revealed during interrogation that he changed as many as a dozen trains while on the run, mostly travelling in the toilets despite carrying a valid ticket in most of the trains.
Shimla police on Sunday afternoon said that they have sent a team to Haryana to bring the accused, Gaurav.However, during his initial quizzing, Gaurav is believed to have confessed to the crime and claimed that the murder took place in a fit of rage while he was under the influence of alcohol. He claimed to have smashed a liquor bottle and used it to stab Pragati repeatedly, till she was rendered motionless and cold. He then fled the hotel room.
But he ran out of luck after the investigators spread over five states picked up a clue leading to his arrest from a train at Jahandhari railway halt in Haryana at daybreak on Sunday. Superintendent of police (SP) Shimla, R M Sharma told TOI on phone that it was late on Saturday afternoon when he picked up a clue about the possibilities of him taking a train to leave Shimla.
"Shortlisting the locations to which he might be heading for on the basis of logic and some gut feeling, cops were put on the job to find out if someone of his description was spotted at any of the stations -- bus, taxi or railways -- in Shimla. As luck would have it, the results came faster than expected," Sharma said. The investigators managed to track him down at a railway station but with a warning that he was randomly changing trains.
This prompted Sharma to alert all possible locations which Gaurav was expected to take. "I contacted my counterpart in Gonda -- S K Bhagat -- as Gaurav happens to be a native of Mankapur locality in Gonda district of Uttar Pradesh. He assured full cooperation," Sharma said. Similar help was sought from the Delhi Police, Uttarakhand Police and the government railway police (GRP) in Haryana (as the tip off stated that he was last seen in a Haryana bound train).
SP Gonda, S K Bhagat told TOI that an alert was sounded at the required places. "Nothing specific was known about Gaurav's location till then, nevertheless surveillance was enhanced at the railway stations and around the house of Gaurav to meet any unexpected development," he said.
Though Shimla police were receiving regular inputs from the teams that had fanned out on all the trains, the arrivals of which coincided with the estimated time of his arrival at Delhi after leaving Shimla on Saturday morning, the manhunt remained a Herculean task for the cops all night long.
Eventually, one of the teams were tipped off about the latest location of Gaurav on board a train to Haryana. The information was passed on promptly to all the other teams and subsequently, the cops nabbed him from a train. Gaurav, already suspicious of being trailed by the police, spotted a police team enter the coach in which he was travelling and quickly went to the toilet and locked himself in.
By then, however, his movements left some of the passengers suspicious. The unusual delay in him coming out of the toilet added further weight to the suspicion of the police team which eventually forced him to open the toilet door and arrested him.
Earlier, on the morning of February 27, the staff of a hotel in Shimla had found a girl lying dead in a pool of blood inside one of the rooms. The initial clues came from a laptop recovered from the room, which led to the identification of the deceased as Pragati, a native of Patna, who was a third year student of textile engineering at IIT, Delhi. The laptop had photographs of her companion, which led to his identification as Gaurav Verma -- a native of Mankapur in Gonda, pursuing his third year engineering in architecture from IIT, Roorkee.