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Teen AP killers sent to juvenile home

Syed Amin Jafri in Hyderabad

The three teenaged killers, who hanged a seven-year-old boy to death at Kudakuda village in Nalgonda district, Andhra Pradesh, have been lodged in a juvenile home at Warangal.

The trio -- Abdul Ghaffar (12), Mohammed Shareef (14) and Nazeer Ahmed (14) -- have been charged with the killing of the kid, Abdul Rehman, by hanging him from a tree in the frivolous hope of getting one month's holidays in the religious seminary they were enrolled in.

The shocking incident occurred last Friday when the trio hatched a plan.

Shareef, who recently joined Madarsa Bait-ul-Uloom (an Arabic school imparting teaching in the Quran), told his colleagues Ghaffar and Nazeer Ahmed that the school would grant holidays if a school child died. He claimed that a similar thing happened at a school in Warangal where he studied earlier.

Thereupon, the trio lured Abdul Rehman and took him to the nearby hillocks on the pretext of playing with him. They tied the hands of the little boy, tightened a noose around his neck and pulled the rope tied to a tree, hanging him to instant death. Later, they informed some of their friends in the school about the "unnatural death" of Rehman.

In the meantime, Khaja Bee, the aunt of the boy, and Syed Rahim, a cousin, launched a frantic search for him when the boy did not return to the seminary till Friday night. They discovered Rehman's body hanging from a tree and lodged a complaint with the police.

DSP in charge of Suryapet Prabhakar Rao and the inspectors of Suryapet rural and Kodad police stations took up investigations and the trio admitted to committing the crime in front of the village elders and the police.

The boys were taken into custody. They were later shifted to a juvenile home in the neighbouring Warangal district.

The teenagers told the police that they perpetrated the crime in all innocence and prayed to Allah to forgive them. However, for Khaja Bi, all hell broke loose since she had brought the orphan child of her sister from Vijayawada and got him admitted into the seminary, where most of the inmates are orphans or children from poor families.

The incident has sent shockwaves across Nalgonda district.

The school authorities, however, claimed that the erring teenagers had never misbehaved or shown criminal tendencies in the past. The news also shattered the families of the three juvenile accused.

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