Residents of Swaroop Nagar on Kushak Road in north-west Delhi alerted police to a highly decomposed body in a nearby field on September 13 morning. The body was so disfigured, with a hand severed and the injuries apparently caused by scavenging animals such as stray dogs, that police could not initially determine the dead person’s sex.
Three days of rigorous investigation led police to learn that the remains of the body belonged to a 17-year-old girl who had been gang-raped and stabbed more than half a dozen times before her body was dumped and left hidden under leaves and mud. She reportedly knew her attackers and had been travelling with them in an auto-rickshaw.
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Police believe she had met one of the accused, a 17-year-old boy, two days earlier, only to be assaulted repeatedly by him and his intoxicated companions after she threatened to report them.
Four people, including three minors, were arrested in the case, and police said the accused and the dead girl knew one another. The oldest of the four accused is 19-year-old Shivam Ganesh, and the three minors are aged 16 and 17, said police. Two knives and clothing linked to the crime were seized from the accused, and at least three of the accused have reportedly admitted to the assault.
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The investigation is being led by Additional DCP (Outer North) Lokeshwaran R and ACP Ravinder Ahlawat, whose teams managed to both ascertain the crime and identify the boys behind it.
The gangrape and murder is believed to have occurred on the intervening night of September 10 and 11, and her body was discovered two days later. The dead girl was a school dropout living independently in the area to support her parents financially, said police. No missing-person report was filed by her parents because she used to go out of the house and stay without contact with her family for days.
Police looked at footage from more than 50 CCTV cameras in the locality to trace an auto-rickshaw parked near the open field. Its driver was tracked down, and his account of his younger brother’s frequent use of the vehicle helped identify the group inside it. A nightlong search led to the tempo’s recovery in Khadda Colony, followed by the arrest of all the four accused.
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A case has been registered under relevant sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the POCSO Act, covering murder, rape and the destruction of evidence. Because POCSO defines anyone under 18 as a child, the involvement of multiple attackers pushes the offence into the category of aggravated penetrative sexual assault — gang assault is explicitly addressed under Section 5, with Section 6 laying out the punishment that follows.
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In 2024, India recorded 40,434 cases of penetrative sexual assault against minors under the POCSO Act, involving 40,846 victims, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. Of these, 21,411 victims were aged between 16 and 18 years, and 15,444 fell between 12 and 16.
