A man accused of killing his girlfriend in Delhi eight years ago has been arrested at the India-Nepal border after escaping from a Nepal prison during the recent violent unrest in the neighbouring country, police said on Monday.
Police said that the accused, Arjun Kumar, alias Bhola (31), carried a reward of Rs 1 lakh and had been absconding since November 2017.
According to police, Kumar allegedly stabbed his 22-year-old girlfriend multiple times before slitting her throat in New Ashok Nagar after she refused to marry him. He locked the rented room where the crime was committed and fled. Her body was discovered a day later, after her father filed a missing complaint.
“Declared a proclaimed offender, Kumar managed to evade capture for years before slipping into Nepal. There, he was involved in another brutal crime,” Harsh Indora, Deputy Commissioner of Police, said.
The officer said that the accused helped his friend Nausad, from Nepal, murder the mother of a married woman with whom Nausad was in a relationship.
“The victim was stabbed, and her throat was slit in a crime echoing Kumar’s earlier modus operandi. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder,” said DCP Indora.
During the recent ‘Gen Z’ protests in Nepal, which left at least 51 people dead and saw the resignation of Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli, a jailbreak allowed Kumar to escape.
“Acting on intelligence that he was attempting to cross into Bihar via Raxaul, a Crime Branch team laid a trap and arrested him,” the officer mentioned in his statement during a press briefing.
Kumar had a violent streak and repeated his pattern of crime in Nepal. Despite being convicted there, we maintained surveillance and tracked his movements.
Kumar, who studied only till Class 5, was working odd jobs in Delhi before the 2017 murder, he said, adding that he will now face trial for the crime that kept him on the run for nearly a decade.