Noida: Accused of leering at her 14-year-old stepdaughter, a 45-year-old man brutally assaulted the girl, strangled her with a piece of rope and left the body in a sack on a deserted stretch of Yamuna Pushta Road last week. Then he did what he thought would buy him time—walked to a police station and filed a missing person complaint, claiming the girl had not returned home after being sent to buy milk.The man, Surendra, a resident of Jewar’s RR Colony, was arrested on Tuesday after the initial probe revealed he had been repeatedly censured by the family for staring at Anjali, his stepdaughter from his fourth marriage.Barely a month before he killed her, Anjali’s grandmother had travelled from Delhi to confront him after the 14-year-old complained he had been leering at her and that she no longer felt safe in his home. He was told to behave. He did not.According to police, on April 20 morning, when Anjali told her mother she wanted to go back to Delhi to live with her grandmother, Surendra made his move. While his wife was still resting, he took the girl out in his e-rickshaw on the pretext of running an errand, drove her to an empty plot half a kilometre from their home, assaulted her and strangled her with a rope. To conceal the body, he stuffed it into a sack, packed other sacks with sand to mimic a delivery load and drove to a deserted stretch of Yamuna Pushta Road between Kanigadhi and Jewar Khadar, where he dumped the body in the bushes.He returned home a few hours later. When his wife asked about Anjali, he feigned ignorance. The couple spent the rest of the day searching for her. The next morning, Surendra walked into Jewar police station with his wife and filed a missing person complaint claiming Anjali had not returned after being sent to buy milk around 11 am the previous day. A case under Section 137(2) (kidnapping) of the BNS was registered, and teams were formed to trace her.The investigation turned quickly as police analysed CCTV footage from the area. One of the clips showed Anjali with him on April 20 morning, the last time she was seen. Police said when confronted with the footage, Surendra broke down.During questioning, he told cops that the girl had largely lived with her grandmother in Delhi and visited Jewar periodically. About a month before her death, she had told her grandmother that she felt unsafe around her stepfather and he had been warned by the woman directly. “Furious at being confronted about his behaviour, Surendra had planned to kill her,” a senior investigating officer said.On Tuesday, police recovered Anjali’s body from the bushes in a mutilated condition, over a week after she was killed. It was sent for autopsy, and murder charges under BNS Section 101 were added.
