Three-year-old Zunera Ahmed, strangled with a cord hours after her teenaged neighbour allegedly kidnapped her, had been dead for 19 days before the family began getting the ransom calls. All the while, her body lay on a terrace an arm's length from her tenement home at Duncan Road in Nagpada, bundled in a bag, the stench camouflaged by a runnel down below, while cops searched every manhole and lane to find her.
The accused teen, who goes to college in south Mumbai, was aided by a friend and, the child's parents now suspect, also by his family, who allegedly did their darnedest to throw cops off their scent with fibs and false help.
The main accused and his friend were produced in the court for juvenile offenders on Monday and sent to a detention home in Dongri.
On the Saturday of December 24, when the JJ Marg police found Zunera's body stashed next to a water tank on the first-floor terrace of a neighbouring building — 19 days after she went missing — they detained the neighbour and his college friend, both said to be around 17, though the child's family is contesting the age.
During interrogation, the teens admitted to every lurid detail of the stunningly grim crime: how the main accused knocked her unconscious with chloroform, how she started bleeding from her nose, how he got scared by her family's frantic search, which drove him to throttle her with the cord of a cell phone charger, before the two of them concealed her body in plain sight and, weeks later, began making the ransom demand of Rs 1 crore. In court, they said they had been beaten up by the police before they owned up.
The crime occurred on December 5, and it wasn't until two weeks later on December 19, that the two accused made contact with Zunera's father Mumtaz to demand Rs 1 crore, thinking the probe was growing cold.
Mumtaz thinks the teen's family is tangled in the crime, or at least its cover-up; his father deflected the investigators' attention away from their tenement, he alleges. "I should have known from the start. They offered more help to look for Zunera than anyone else in the neighbourhood. I thought they were such nice people. But they were trying to hide the crime," he told Mirror.
Backing his suspicions, the 37-year-old father said that after he returned from the vain search for his daughter on December 5, the suspect's father approached him around midnight, seemingly helpfully, saying a 'medicine man' near Mahim Dargah could divine where Zunera was. "He suggested that I visit him immediately. I was so frazzled at the time I was willing to do anything to trace my daughter," said Mumtaz, a scrapdealer.
So he set off for Mahim straight away, and when he reached around 12:30 am, the accused's father called him up. "He asked me where I was and I told him. He said reassuringly baba would come up with something to find my daughter." The so-called baba had nothing to offer beyond empty assurances that Zunera would return. In desperation, Mumtaz made his way to another such man in CST, before going to JJ Marg police to lodge a missing complaint. He got home by 3:30 am.
It is over these three hours that Mumtaz suspects the accused dumped the body on the terrace with the help of his parents. "When I think about it now, it all falls in place. Everyone was asleep, giving them enough time to get rid of my daughter's body," he said. The police are yet to pick up evidence for his claim.
Over the following days, the family extended a lot of help to trace Zunera, Mumtaz said; the suspect himself went to mosques in the area, asking them to make an announcement about his "missing sister". "They brought us food. They also got some priests to our house to pray. The boy's father gave me a charm to hang at my door, stating it'd bring luck, and my daughter back."