The accused in Latehar killings has confessed to the police that he sexually assaulted one of the two children who he later beheaded and buried in the backyard of his house, police said on Friday.
Thirty-year-old Sunil Oraon was arrested on Thursday late evening on charges of killing two children of his village. The matter came to light after villagers on Thursday morning found half-buried, naked and decapitated body of a 12-year-old boy in Oraon’s backyard. They informed the local police, who exhumed the boy’s body and found another half-buried and decapitated body of a 10-year-old girl in similar condition around the same area later in the day. Both the children were missing since Wednesday, police said.
Oraon, who has be undergoing treatment for a mental illness at a local psychiatry institute, told the police during interrogation that the 10-year-old girl came to his shop on Wednesday to buy sweets. Oraon lured her to his house, where he stripped the minor naked and sexually assaulted her, he confessed to the police. Meanwhile, the other child who became a victim of Oraon’s predation came to his house asking for his father’s mobile phone which Oraon had borrowed. Oraon, police said, also forced the boy to strip naked and later killed him.
“He (Oraon) has confessed that he sexually assaulted the girl. We suspect that he might have also sexually assaulted the boy as his body too was found naked. Later, he beheaded both of them, tried to bury them in haste and fled. The accused has been charged under sections of POCSO (Prevention of Children against Sexual Offences) Act,” said Latehar’s Superintendent of Police Prashant Anand.
Anand added that Oraon was currently kept at a hospital under strict security. “He is extremely violent, so we have to keep him under tight security. Due to his mental illness he has a tendency of forgetting what all happened on the fateful day, which is making our interrogation time-consuming,” said Anand.
On Thursday, the villagers suspected that the killings may have been fueled by superstitious beliefs of the perpetrator. However, the police on Friday rubbished the rumours and said that it was a straightforward case of a mentally unstable man’s barbarism.
The accused also has a criminal history. Police said that he was accused in an old murder case in Palamu. The accused was deserted by two of his ex spouses, probably due to his mental illness, police said. A week before the incident, he had assaulted his current spouse, who left his place and went to live with her parents in another village.