Pradyuman killer to be treated as an adult; JJB

DAINIK NATION BUREAU

The Juvenile Justice Board has pronounced that the 16-year-old student of Gurgaon’s Ryan International School, who is an accused of the murder of Pradyuman Thakur, will be treated as an adult and undergo a regular trial in a court. If convicted, he will stay in a correctional home till he  completes 21 years and then be transferred to a jail. The teen, whose bail application was rejected last week, will be produced at a court in Haryana on December 22.

Pradyuman, a seven-year-old student of the same school, was found with his throat slit outside the school’s washroom on September 8. A month later, the CBI, which was handling the Pradyuman murder case, arrested the Class XI student, saying the earlier arrest of a bus conductor made by the local police, was a frame-up.

The agency said the teen has confessed to killing Pradyuman, the motive was to ensure that an approaching examination and a parent-teacher meeting got postponed. While there was no clinching evidence, the agency said the CCTV footage recovered from outside the school washroom showed that the teen was the last one leaving the washroom.

In course of the investigation, the investigators had taken him to the school to reconstruct the events and to various shops to find out where he bought the knife that was used to kill the child. The boy’s father has alleged that the confession was extracted by torture. His son had been hung upside down and brutally thrashed.

Commenting on this decision, Pradyuman’s parents, who had appealed that the teen accused be tried as an adult under the amended Juvenile Justice law, said he is grateful to the judiciary for the decision.