New Delhi: After he allegedly assaulted, raped and murdered the 22-year-old daughter of an Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer, Rahul Meena did not panic. He dragged her body to the floor below, broke open the safe, and changed his blood-soaked pants and footwear.
“I entered the house (looking) for money,” Meena told the Saket court which remanded him to four days’ police custody Thursday.
Surrounded by Delhi Police officers, 19-year-old Meena walked into the court premises around 2.15 pm with his hands tucked at the back, and face covered with a white cloth. “Galati hui hai mujhse, apraadh hua hai. Pashchatap hai,” he told the court; eyes fixated on the floor, voice feeble. [I made a mistake, committed a crime. I feel remorse.]
But police officers privy to the investigation say Meena was ‘calculating’. He allegedly raped the victim when she was unconscious and then dragged her body from the rooftop to the floor below to open the biometric lock on the safe, a police officer told ThePrint.
The son of a farmer in Rajasthan’s Alwar, Meena was arrested the previous day by police from a hotel in Dwarka, hours after CCTV cameras caught him exiting the house of his former employer, an Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer, in South Delhi. The IRS officer and his wife had returned home from the gym to find their daughter strangulated allegedly with a charging cable. Doctors later alerted the family and police to signs of rape.
Meena worked for the family as a house help for around eight months and was let go in March after other domestic workers from the neighbourhood complained about him. Meena, they told his employer, borrowed money from them and never returned it.
Following his arrest Thursday, Delhi Police also discovered that Meena had been booked for rape in Rajasthan’s Alwar just the previous day.
Two days, two cities—one accused
Two days before he returned to New Delhi, Rahul Meena attended a wedding Tuesday in his native village in Alwar. It was after the wedding that he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman.Her husband and Meena were acquainted with each other through online Ludo.
“He was attracted to the woman and wanted to be with her. She had refused his advances multiple times,” said another officer privy to the probe, adding that police recorded the woman’s statement Wednesday and her medical examination was conducted the same day.
“During the wedding, he (Meena) told his friends that he had to leave for Delhi. After he sexually assaulted the woman, he stole a phone and left for Delhi. He was also in touch with a cousin from Gurugram,” the officer told ThePrint.
Upon reaching Delhi, Meena went straight to his former employer’s house in South Delhi. Feed from CCTV cameras in the area shows him entering the house at 6.28 pm and exiting with a backpack at 7.22 pm. Police officials suspect Meena entered the house using the spare key which he knew about owing to his time with the family.
Once he was in, he went straight to the rooftop. This is where the IRS officer’s daughter, an engineering graduate preparing for the civil services examinations, was studying in a room.
“He entered the room and told her to give him money. She refused. The woman told him to immediately leave the house. This triggered him, he used a hard object, we suspect it was a lamp, to hit her in the head, and the woman fell down,” a third officer said. According to the officer, police suspect that Meena raped the woman while she was unconscious.
“He then dragged her body to the floor below, which he entered using the spare key, and used her blood-soaked fingers to open the biometric-secured safe,” the officer added.
When the biometric lock did not open, Meena used tools he could find to break the safe open and fled with Rs 2-2.5 lakh. “He was very well aware of how to evade arrest in one case, and fled to another city. How he managed to enter the house is also important. He knew where the spare key was kept, and where the deceased would be, in case he needed access to the biometric…we suspect he was calculating,” said the third officer.
The officer added that after he committed the alleged crimes, Meena “did not flee in a panic; instead, he changed his clothes and shoes inside the house to alter his appearance for CCTV cameras”. Police sources said Meena, after he fled the scene of crime, took cabs to Palam and Dwarka to maintain a low profile. He was using the phone he stole from Alwar, but police tracked him down through his ‘internet activity and Instagram usage’.
‘He betrayed their trust’
On Thursday, as a stream of mourners gathered at the house of the deceased woman in South Delhi, domestic workers from the neighbourhood said Meena betrayed the family’s trust.
“Rahul, who started working here 8-9 months ago, was allowed to stay in the servant quarters. He was given food and salary. The family trusted him with everything…but he betrayed their trust,” said a domestic worker who said she had been working in the same building for 15 years.
She added that in the last few months, many in the neighbourhood had grown tired of Meena repeatedly asking them for money. “At first, when he sought money, they loaned it to him for interest. People trusted him. But, we later realised he was using this money to consume alcohol, and gamble it away.”
Meena had borrowed between Rs 5,000 and Rs 15,000 from each of the lenders.
When they asked him for their money, he got into fights with them, the domestic worker said, adding that Meena then “started misappropriating the bills”.
“If somebody gave him money to buy something from the local shops, he would lie about the cost. He wouldn’t provide bills. He was just lying about everything compulsively,” said the domestic worker quoted earlier.
She added that Meena cultivated an image of himself as “soft-spoken” and “trustworthy”. “It was enough to manipulate us and local vendors into loaning him the money. He was hired through a personal contact, unlike others, who are hired through an agency.”
Another domestic worker, who works at the house opposite the IRS officer’s, told ThePrint: “When the workers got to know that many of them had been cheated, they decided to approach bade sahab (IRS officer).”
The IRS officer fired Meena and ensured that the money he owed others was returned to them. The third police officer said the IRS officer politely asked Meena to leave but “he possibly took the termination personally, and developed a grudge against his employers”.
Meena, said the officer, still owed lenders around Rs 1.5 lakh which appears to be his motive behind returning to his former employer’s house Wednesday morning.
Still coming to terms with the brutality of the crime that took place in the house across the street, one domestic worker—unsure about how this incident would impact their relationship with their employers—told ThePrint, “After what Rahul did, families will question our identities. They will feel suspicious of us.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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