Jaipur: He refers to himself as Sikander — “maut ka kaher”, a “catastrophe”. He is accused of raping and brutalising multiple minors, boys and girls, repeatedly. And all he can say in his defence is, “I love kids”.
Sikander, a convicted sexual assaulter and murderer out on bail, was arrested by Jaipur police last week for allegedly raping two girls aged five and seven within 10 days.
According to his statement to police, accessed by ThePrint, he spotted both children while on the prowl around Jaipur on his bike, in search of targets. He was allegedly armed with two toy pistols, a knife and a blade, and cash and promises of goodies to lure his victims.
He told police that he took them both to secluded spots and raped them. When they tried to scream, he stifled their voice till they almost choked. After dropping off one of the victims at her home, Sikander said, he stopped at a dhaba for tea.
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The history-sheeter
The rape of the seven-year-old on 1 July had triggered violence in Jaipur. People from her neighbourhood had gathered outside the hospital where she was medically examined, and torched over 160 vehicles, demanding the arrest of the accused and strict punishment for him.
There was no communal angle to the protest, but a massive police contingent was deployed to maintain law and order in the city. Internet services were suspended as well.
Sikander, a notorious history-sheeter out on bail for a laundry list of crimes, was finally arrested on 6 July.
Also known as Jeevanu, Shakir, Javed, and Kalu, Sikander sodomised and murdered an 11-year-old boy in 2004, for which he was given a life term by a sessions court.
He is an accused in over 14 other cases of molestation, theft, rape and robbery, but has somehow managed to secure bail each time.
According to police records, Sikander has been granted bail thrice since he was first arrested in 2004.
Got bail thrice, despite murder conviction
According to Jaipur police, Sikander had been in prison for 11 years in the 2004 sodomy-murder case, but got bail from the Rajasthan High Court on 6 February 2015 after he said in a plea that he wished to “get married” and “settle down”.
“At the time he was arrested, in 2004, life term was only 14 years. Since he had already spent 11 years in jail, the court granted bail,” said a police officer.
“The other cases against him pertained to theft and robbery, in which the trial was underway. Since there were no major complaints against him from the jail, he was given bail for ‘good conduct’,” the officer added.
However, he was back in jail the next September for allegedly stealing a tractor. According to the police, he had been in jail for more than a year, but secured bail once again and stepped out on 15 November 2017.
Soon afterwards, he was booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act for allegedly molesting the minor granddaughter of his landlord.
When police went to arrest him, he attacked one of the personnel with a rod and fled. He was arrested from Ajmer a week later, on 4 April 2018.
He spent another 10 months in jail before getting bail in early February 2019.
Four months later, he allegedly committed the two rapes for which he is currently in jail. According to police, he also shot dead a liquor vendor and stole his gold earring, silver bangle and Rs 20,000 in cash.
“He is a psychopath. A violent pervert man,” Jaipur Police Commissioner Anand Srivastava told ThePrint. “He has no remorse for what he has done… Despite us putting his entire criminal record on file, he manages bail each time.”
Another police officer said Sikander pulled off his bail pleas through decent lawyers he hired with money made off drugs.
“When out of jail, he supplies drugs across Rajasthan and, in one day, he is able to make Rs 10,000,” said the officer. “Whenever he needs money, he manages it. Also, he has a lot of friends (who are) gang members, who are always ready to lend. He has never faced a money crunch. This is the reason he is able to furnish a bail bond and secure release each time.”
The police told ThePrint that Sikander’s journey into crime started right as he entered adulthood. According to them, Sikander dropped out of school after Class 5 and came into contact with a local gang of thieves at 18. It was while working with the gang, said the police, that he was introduced to drugs.
“Once he broke into 13 shops in one night. He often had a competition with a friend, Rafiq, on who is a better thief,” said a third Jaipur police officer.
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A cup of tea after rape
Sikander’s statement to police suggests he committed his crimes with the cold detachment typical of serial criminals.
He spotted his five-year-old victim on the night of 22 June. When he saw her, he told police, “I started looking at her with a bad intention.”
He then allegedly approached her as a friend of her father, and offered to buy her snacks.
“I got her namkeen, took her for a ride on my bike, and took her to Manbag, a secluded area,” Sikander told police, “When she started to cry, I slapped her.”
Sikander then allegedly raped the girl. When she started to scream, he gagged her till she was almost breathless and “threatened to kill her”.
After allegedly assaulting her for an hour, he discovered her private parts bleeding.
“I tore off the sleeve of my shirt and tried to stop the bleeding. She kept howling. I then dropped her home and burnt the shirt,” he said in his statement.
“I went to have tea after that,” he added.
‘Saw a 7-year-old, could not control myself’
The episode repeated itself on 1 July, as Sikander spotted a seven-year-old girl while on another ride around the city. “I saw her and could not control myself,” he told police. Like with the five-year-old, he introduced himself as a friend of her father, before handing her Rs 70.
“I told her to go and give it to her father. When she took the money and was about to leave, I followed her,” he said. “I told her I will give her more money if she came with me. She sat on the bike and I drove off with her.”
According to him, he bought the child biscuits on the way, then took her to Aminshah Nullah in Jaipur. “I took her to the bushes surrounding the nullah,” he stated, “When she started to scream, I gagged her and then raped her.”
As the girl continued to resist him, he hit her near the eyes with the butt of the toy pistol. “She got scared and kept quiet as I assaulted her,” he stated.
After an hour, he dropped her at a shop near her house and then left for Kota, police said.
‘Picked up kids, transgenders from pavements’
“Mujhe chhote bacchon se pyar hai (I love young children)”. This is what Sikandar had to say to most questions posed to him during interrogation, said the police.
He is also said to have confessed to having committed several unknown crimes, assaulting homeless children — girls and boys aged 14-15 who he found on pavements.
Sikander told the police that following his release on bail in February 2019, he started consuming smack, including through injections.
“I often went out for a walk… When I used to see kids sleeping on the road, I would drag them off the footpath to rape them,” he told police.
He is said to have confessed to assaults on transgenders as well.
“He would threaten to kill them by waving his toy pistol at them, and rape them,” one of the police officers quoted above said, adding: “He would sometimes give them money. He has confessed to having raped many, including transgenders, sometimes thrice a night. None of those cases, however, was reported to us.”
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‘Sexually assaulted undertrials in prison’
Sikander has also allegedly confessed to sexual assault on fellow inmates during his stints in jail. “During my stay in jail I engaged in unnatural sex with many,” he said in his statement.
A police officer told ThePrint that he would do this with the help of a “gang”. “He would make a gang of his own and was all powerful inside the prison. Any undertrial who would come was first made to appear before him,” said the police officer.
“The young boys, who were new to the prison, were not able to refuse his advances,” the officer added.
Another police officer said he “ran several gangs” while in prison.
“He was shifted to Bharatpur jail from Jaipur after he brutally stabbed an inmate. Once, while being taken for a court hearing, he even tried to escape,” the officer added.
Photos of minor girls hung in his house
After Sikander was arrested earlier this month, police conducted a search on his rented house in Jaipur’s Nai ki Thadi, an area with a predominantly Muslim population.
The findings were disturbing. A diary recovered by police had three sketches: One was of him, while another sought to depict a woman believed to be his wife, referred to as Shehnaz Bano, the eyes shaded red and tears rolling down one of them. The third, said the police, was a sword piercing a heart, with the letter “S” drawn on the same page.
“These sketches, too, show that he loved inflicting pain on women,” added a police officer. “The name on the sketch is Shehnaz Bano, probably his wife, who left him within two months of marriage after she got to know about his ways,” the officer added, “In his interrogation, he said he would have killed her, if he had a chance.”
More disturbingly, photos of two young girls, his landlord’s eight-year-old daughter and her friend, were found hanging on the walls of Sikander’s house.
“It appears that he may have intended to target the girls, but never got a chance,” a police officer investigating the case said. “His landlord, too, was shocked to find his daughter’s photo there.”
The eight-year-old girl was equally aghast when told about the photographs, and her sentiments have since alternated between terror and relief. Terror, because she and her friend were on the radar of a rapist. Relief, because he was arrested before he could reach them.
“He looked at me like an owl,” she said of the eight months he had lived in the area. “Like he would eat me up,” she added, anxiously rubbing her hands. “I never knew he had a photo of me in his room. I hope he never returns.”
Another six-year-old resident of the neighbourhood said she had missed becoming his victim by a whisker, saved by instinct.
Just a few days before he was arrested, she said, he had offered to buy her a new pair of sandals. She was, however, wary of him because of the way he “looked at girls”, called them by different names, and touched them inappropriately.
“He would pull my cheeks and call me bullet rani. I was terrified of him,” she said, adding that she refused his offer. “I hated the way he touched me when he found me alone,” she added.
“He often invited my friend over to his room, saying that he would show her a very nice film on his phone. He often told her ‘tu badi sunder hai ae chuhiya. Chal mere kamre mein, main tujhe picture dikhata hun (you are very beautiful, come to my room, I will show you a film),” the six-year-old said.
“She did not go because once he had shown another girl a very dirty picture while no one was around, but that girl had managed to escape,” she added.
The girls in Nai ki Thadi often discussed Sikander, said a seven-year-old but never called him out, fearing they would be ultimately blamed for “encouraging” him, or that it may cause a fight in the colony. “Thank god, police have taken him,” she added.
The father of the six-year-old said the whole affair had caught them off-guard. “The kids never told us anything. Had they told us that he made them uncomfortable, we would have beaten him to a pulp and handed him over to police,” he added.
‘No therapy for such people’
Speaking to ThePrint, clinical psychologist Rajat Mitra said reform was a dim possibility for offenders like Sikander.
“This man appears to be suffering from acute delusions. Such an act gives him a high. His fear of consequences is zero. For him, rape is a compulsive act that he has to repeat and there is no therapy for such people,” he said, “The only solution is to keep them away from society and under close supervision.”
Mitra added that judges and police needed to understand the importance of keeping such people locked. Sikander’s arrest comes just weeks after a man out on bail — accused of his nine-year-old daughter’s rape and a 15-year-old’s molestation, among other things — emerged as the prime suspect in the murder of a two-year-old girl in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, who died after being beaten for several hours.
“For a person like him (Sikander), developing any relationship with an adult is impossible, as they find it too complex, which is why they lean towards children,” he said. “People like these do not have the mechanism to stop the urge to assault children and, thus, need to be kept away. Judges need to understand that these people are a grave danger to society and must not be let out at any cost.”
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This is your problem you did not mentioned his full name so that his religion is not known…… His real name is jahid……….
There are two types of rape : “shades of gray (SOG)” rapes, and “black & white (BNW)” rapes.
In SOG rapes man and woman are known to each other, and rape is performed out of anger or revenge, or ego, or unrequited love. These are human emotions, and though rape for ANY reason is unacceptable because it heaps untold insult on a weaker or helpless person, human rules and laws can be and are used to deal with the punishment in such cases.
BNW rapes are, when the man and woman are complete STRANGERS. The man who commits rape uses the woman as an ANIMAL to satiate his lust. While in olden times such a man would resort to masturbation to spend his pent up energy, now he seeks out a PREY. Clearly, human laws, or laws of a civilized society do not come into picture here. If a man hunts, he should be hunted – – in simpler words he should be KILLED. No, he should not be castrated or made chemically impotent, because in that case he will become a massively angry man; now that he cannot become a serial rapist, he will become a serial murderer.
We are such hypocrites that we apply human laws even to animals to show off our fake compassion. Justice Verma, who thank God is dead, is SOLELY RESPONSIBLE for a great surge in rapes after the Nirbhaya Case for recommending that EVEN IN NIRBHAYA types of cases death penalty cannot be given. Rapists are roaming fearless now. Our newspapers report 3-4 cases everyday. For every case reported there must be at least five suppressed. The world calls us the most unsafe country for women! Verma should have opined something along the BNW cases mentioned above, and believe me, hundreds of girls would have been spared horrible mortification. Many have even committed suicide.