A court here on Tuesday granted bail to Ashok Kumar, the bus conductor who was presented as a prime accused by Gurgaon Police in the chilling murder of seven-year-old Pradyuman Thakur. Pradyuman was a class 2 student of Gurgaon’s Ryan International School.
Kumar, bus conductor in this Ryan school, was arrested hours after Pradyuman was found in a pool of blood with his throat slit outside the washroom of the school on 8 September.
The police had then claimed that Kumar had tried to assault Pradyuman sexually and killed him with a knife when he resisted.
Kumar’s family had denied these charges, maintaining that Gurgaon Police allegedly tortured him to extract such a confession from him.
A Gurgaon court Tuesday reportedly granted bail to Kumar on a bond of Rs 50,000. The
court had on Monday reserved its order after hearing Kumar’s lawyer as well as the counsel for the CBI which has been investigating the case now.
Kumar’s counsel Mohit Verma had filed the bail application for him after the CBI recently arrested a class XI student, aged about 16 years, of the same school on charges of killing Pradyuman.
Kumar has, however, still not got a clean chit from the CBI.
“We have brought to the notice of the Gurgaon court the fact that CBI has no proof against Kumar,” Verma said. He said the CBI had claimed the juvenile accused had “confessed” to his crime and that the premier agency had also established his “motive”.
Opposing Kumar’s bail plea, the CBI counsel, however, said the agency’s probe was yet to reach a stage where it could give a give a clean chit to Kumar. “He (Kumar) is still one of the suspects,” he said.
In a stunning twist in the case, the CBI had on 8 November declared that it has apprehended a class XI student of the Ryan school for allegedly killing Pradyuman in a bid to get an upcoming examination and a parent-teacher meeting (PTM) deferred. The CBI also asserted that the senior student was its prime suspect in Pradyuman’s killing.