Serial killer Chandrakant Jha also known as ‘Butcher of Delhi’ who fled after getting parole in 2023 was apprehended by the Crime Branch, the police said on Saturday adding that he was serving a life imprisonment in three murder cases.

A resident of Alipur, Outer North Delhi, he shook the national capital in 2006-07 by killing people in same pattern by decapitating their heads and thereafter chopped their various body parts and threw the decapitated bodies of these young men outside the Central Tihar Jail and scattered their body parts at various places around Delhi.

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Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime) Sanjay Kumar Sain said, In view of the absconding of the serial killer which is a threat to the society due to his previous crime pattern, a dedicated team was formed to nab him.

The team relentlessly worked for six months to trace Jha, and that includes questioning all his old kiths and kins, visiting at his previous crime spots to find out any possible clues. The efforts led to zeroing down of a mobile number whose activity was highly suspicious and on Friday, he was nabbed from Old Delhi Railway Station from where he was trying to flee to Bihar with a motive of never coming back to Delhi, he added.

The series of murders which shocked Delhi to its roots in 2006 and 2007, creating a sense of terror in the minds of the residents, Jha was involved in seven of them but was found guilty in three. He initially received two death sentences and life imprisonment until death in February 2013 but later his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without remission in January 2016, the official mentioned.

The Additional Commissioner elaborated the modus operandi of the accused involved extending help to young men, often migrants from UP and Bihar, by assisting them in finding work, offering meals, and treating them like his own children.

During the course of their stay with him, he took offence to their small indulgences like drinking, eating meat, womanizing, lying and dalliances and his demeanour would take a drastic and savage turn at the slightest provocation, leading to brutal murders.

He would then dismember the victims’ bodies and scatter the remains across various locations in Delhi. Before murdering them, he used to tie their hands on the pretext that they would be punished and the victims suspected him least, thinking that they may be let off with a minor punishment.

However, the accused used to first strangulate his victims with the help of locally made Non-Chaku and then Chop-off the head, legs and hands. Thereafter, he used to pack the dead body in a plastic bag and carry that in his cycle-rickshaw fitted with an engine and later dumping it at pre-marked locations.

The entire act of cutting and packing the body was carried out in great detail as the accused himself boasts of performing a very elegant operation which led to minimum trickling and splattering of blood. Jha used to challenge the law enforcement agencies by keeping letters with dead bodies which were signed as “tumhara baap + jijaji, CC,”.