Taking a cue from film, caretaker kills differently abled patient

Accused, a minor, apprehended from railway station; stolen cash, jewellery recovered from him

A locked room, a single black glove, some scribblings on the bathroom mirror and a dead body on the bed. The crime scene seemed to have been lifted straight from a Bollywood thriller and a policeman in the investigating team suddenly remembered the name –  Tu Chor Main Sipahi.

The 1996 action drama became the premise of a 17-year-old caretaker’s murder and robbery plan that he executed on Wednesday afternoon at the posh Safdarjung Enclave in south Delhi. With a pillow, the accused allegedly smothered an 18-year-old differently abled boy he was attending to and fled the house with cash and jewellery worth lakhs of rupees. The deceased’s family has a jewellery business in Chandni Chowk and Mumbai.

The Delhi police promptly deployed over 60 officers in search of the accused and he was caught the same night from a train minutes before it was to leave the New Delhi railway station.

The accused allegedly admitted during his interrogation that he planned the murder after watching the popular Hindi film in which the killer left a black glove with an initial ‘K’ near the victim’s body and scribbled a message on the mirror before fleeing with stolen items.

Though the accused’s glove had no initials, he wrote a cryptic message using a red toothpaste on the bathroom mirror that could be interpreted as “Killer King”, the name used by the murderer in the movie, and a four-digit code, according to the police.

At 5.05 p.m. on Wednesday, the police received a PCR call about a murder at a house in the Safdarjung Development Area.

The complainant, the deceased’s sister told the police that her parents and grandmother had gone to a nearby temple around 2.30 p.m and she had left for Green Park market at 3.45 p.m. Her brother was alone in the house with the caretaker.