New Delhi: “Who are you? What do you want?” a man in an ashram, dressed as a priest, demanded to know from police officers.
Delhi Crime Branch officers were startled by his defiance, but they had compelling intelligence suggesting the priest, who had assumed the name Daya Das, was, in fact, a fugitive serial killer they had been tracking for 18 months.
For months, police officers disguised as his followers had been surveilling him through temples and ashrams across Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
They pulled him aside and handed him an ultimatum. Following an intense confrontation, the priest finally confessed: he was indeed Devender Kumar Sharma, the man the media had once branded ‘Doctor Death’, because of his degree in Ayurvedic medicine and a long trail of chilling crimes.
Had it not been for phone calls to his wife, Sharma might have continued his double life as Daya Das for a little longer, quietly reading palms and suggesting remedies to devotees in ashrams, roaming around in religious places including Mathura and Vrindavan.
But his life as a wandering priest came to an end when he was finally arrested Sunday after around 18 months.
Sharma, 67, jumped parole, which ended in October 2023, while serving multiple sentences for crimes ranging from murder to kidnapping and robbery.
It wasn’t his first attempt to evade the judicial system. In 2020, he absconded during a 20-day parole and remained on the run for nearly 7 months. This time, however, he managed to evade authorities for over a year and a half.
According to the police, he has been convicted in seven murder cases, sentenced to life imprisonment, and is accused of kidnapping and killing at least 21 taxi drivers across Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana and Rajasthan between 1998 and 2004. Some of these bodies were flushed out of Kasganj’s Hazara canal.
DCP (Crime Branch) Aditya Gautam said Sharma was also sentenced to death by a Gurugram court for the murder of a taxi driver and has 27 previous involvements of murder, kidnapping and robbery.
During that period, Sharma was also involved in what was known as the ‘Gurgaon kidney scandal’, a sprawling kidney trafficking racket reportedly involving as many as 600 illegal transplants across cities including Mumbai, Jaipur, Guntur and Anand.
According to police officials, Sharma is accused of facilitating over 125 of these transplants for the infamous Dr Amit Kumar, earning between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 7 lakh for each procedure.
Kumar, who fled the country to Nepal, was extradited by the Central Bureau of Investigation in 2013. He has since been convicted in cases of illegal organ trade and also faces charges under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), filed by the Enforcement Directorate.
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Mathura-Vrindavan-Kumbh
In October last year, when Delhi Police’s Crime Branch unit, led by Inspector Rakesh Kumar under ACP Umesh Barthwal, was handed over Sharma’s case, it started retracing his steps.
The starting point was Aligarh’s Puraini, listed as his permanent address in official records. The next stop was Bandikui in Rajasthan, where he started a ‘Janta clinic’ after completing his Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery from Bihar.
He ran this clinic for 11 years, until 1995, when he turned to criminal activities after incurring a loss of Rs 11 lakh in a gas dealership scam, DCP Gautam said. He had started a fake gas agency.
“We learned from local residents that he hadn’t been seen in Puraini. He had also moved out of Bihar in 1984. So, our next lead took us to Bandikui. But even there, information was scarce. What we did find out was that his wife and children had relocated to Mumbai and we started working on it,” a source revealed.
Investigators began tracking his wife’s call records and discovered a pattern of calls from multiple numbers, each lasting unusually long duration.
According to sources, these calls originated from places like Varanasi, Mathura, Vrindavan and Prayagraj during the Kumbh Mela.
“When we located the people using these numbers, they told us that a ‘baba’ had used their phones to make the calls. Then we were certain that he was disguising himself as a priest,” the source said.
Meanwhile, officers received information that someone fitting the description was seen in Dausa.
After 18 months, he was finally arrested Sunday.
Of bodies in Hazara
Police case records say that Sharma confessed to having killed over 50 truck and taxi drivers along with his associates.
Public court documents show that in some cases, Sharma was acquitted as the prosecution couldn’t prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt and corroborate the chain of events.
Police officers said that the other members of his gang, hailing from Aligarh, carried out the series of murders of truck and taxi drivers, killing them by strangling them and then throwing their bodies in the Hazara canal.
“They would kill the truck drivers who carried gas cylinders and sell them off. After killing the cab drivers, they would sell off the cars in Uttar Pradesh’s grey market, for Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000,” another source said.
In one case, Sharma was convicted by a trial court and the sentence was upheld by the Delhi High Court in 2022. The victim’s brother, Dinesh Sharma, had approached Dholna Police upon reading news of bodies being recovered from the Hazara Nahar in January 2004.
Two dead bodies were recovered from the canal—one on 23 January and the other on 25 January. Yagya Dev Sharma, the brother, identified the body recovered on 25 January as Dinesh. Autopsy reports showed that the victim was strangled to death and the body was recovered with a rope tied around the neck.
Sharma had booked Dinesh’s cab from Vichhora Sahib Taxi Stand in Delhi’s Sarita Vihar for Bulandshahr’s Narora on 23 January, 2004. He gave a false Sarita Vihar address to the taxi stand owner to book the taxi. He, along with his associates, killed Dinesh and disposed of the taxi.
His associates, meanwhile, continue to remain in jail facing murder and kidnapping cases in these cases.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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