Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday rejected the bail plea of 16-year-old by who is accused of murdering seven-year-old boy at a Gurugram school in September 2017.
The lawyer, representing the family of Class II student whose throat was slit by the accused, Sushil Tekriwal said the bail application was rejected by the bench of Justice Daya Chaudhary.
A Class XI student, the accused was arrested by the Central Bureau Investigation (CBI) last year on the charges of killing Pradyuman Thakur, a Class II student of Gurugram’s Ryan International School.
Pradyuman was found dead with his throat slit inside the school premises on September 8, 2017. The Juvenile Justice Board had earlier on December 20 ruled that the 16-year-old accused will be tried as an adult.
The lawyer of the accused, Sandeep Aneja, had filed the bail application on the grounds that the investigation in the matter was not completed within the prescribed period of 60 days and the same was submitted after 90 days by the CBI.
The CBI’s lawyer Sumeet Goel, however, argued against the bail petition and reiterated its stand that the accused’s search history on his mobile phone before and after the murder throws light on his conduct before the crime, his intention to commit it and his behaviour after the incident to avoid arrest.
The CBI had filed a 5,000-page charge sheet in the case in February and charged the accused with the murder of eight-year-old claiming clinching evidence which included fingerprints at the crime scene and the teenager’s mobile data.
The juvenile accused had also asked at least six of his friends to get poison or a knife for him to kill “some child,” so that the parent-teacher meeting and examinations were cancelled, the chargesheet stated.
The agency had also filed a 15-page reply in the court on April 5 against his bail, saying the juvenile searched and downloaded information about poisoning, various poisons, their effects and their sources in August and September 2017.