NEW DELHI: Behind the wheel of a routine commercial cab sat a habitual offender who, after a heinous crime, allegedly operated with the precision of a professional.Police sources said after abducting, raping and killing a 10-year-old girl in Mehrauli area, driver Basu Singh carefully tried to cover his tracks. He changed his clothes on the roadside and later thoroughly scrubbed away the car to remove all forensic evidence. Then, he carried on with work as usual, accepting the next ride that came his way.Singh’s criminal background is more than a decade old. He faces at least five cases, including molestation, rioting and attempted murder, dating back to 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022, all registered in his hometown in Bihar’s Khagaria district.While cops are yet to obtain a formal dossier from Bihar Police, Singh has claimed that the cases were filed during the time his family was embroiled in a land dispute. One case was related to a protest during a festival, one of his family members told TOI.Police said they had seized the pair of clothes Singh was originally wearing and was spotted wearing in CCTV footage. The footage, cops said, also captured him cleaning the vehicle near his employer’s residential building in Gurgaon a little while after the incident. A security guard from the building also spotted him there.After he cleaned the vehicle, police said Singh accepted a ride from Chakkarpur in Gurgaon and dropped the passenger in Nangloi.
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Cops had, meanwhile, landed at his registered accommodation in Gurgaon, which belonged to his brother. He told police that Singh was not at home and showed them the CCTV cameras installed in the vicinity. The cops then used technical surveillance to zoom in on the suspect, finally nabbing him when he was heading towards Vikaspuri after the dropoff in Nangloi.Police said a potency test on Singh was conducted on Wednesday. During interrogation, Singh told cops that the 12km stretch from where he kidnapped the girl and later dumped her body was known to him, as he used to often drive in that area.Before he became a cabbie, Singh was a security guard. “He used to work in the housing society where I live, which is how I knew him,” said his employer Ankit, an aspiring businessman.Ankit told TOI that he had bought a second-hand car to launch his cab business, and gave it to Singh in Feb this year to drive as he was already registered and verified by a cab aggregator. “My interactions with him were mostly limited to collecting the car rental. He had only told me multiple times that he had some family dispute,” Ankit recalled.
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He said police had contacted him on Monday and informed him about the incident. “What I thought would be my first business venture has ended in failure,” Ankit said.Meanwhile, the father of the victim has demanded capital punishment for Singh.
