Teen kills 9-yr-old, hides body at home

MUMBAI: It’s a Sunday residents of the upper middle-class residential colony of Malad are not likely to forget for a long time. The quiet, mainly business and working-class neighbourhood, was stunned when they heard that a teenager from their building complex had allegedly murdered his friend and stashed away the body in a cupboard.

In the first such crime to occur in the city, police sources said Saurabh Tribhovan,16, strangulated Parth Panchal, 9, with a nylon rope and then hid the body in a cupboard in his house. On Sunday, two days after the incident, the teenager confessed to the crime when his parents questioned him about the stench coming from his room.

“On Friday, I had gone to a friend’s house and my wife had gone to visit a doctor. Saurabh was alone at home when he committed the crime. I didn’t know he was depressed,” said the teenager’s father Dinesh Tribhovan, a sharebroker.

Saurabh’s parents then informed the police. He was arrested under section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code and will be produced in the juvenile court today.

On June 15, the Panchals, who are in the steel business, lodged a missing complaint with the Dindoshi police after Parth failed to return home. However, they got news of their son from the Tribhovans who called them up soon after Saurabh owned up to the crime.

“Parth used to play with other boys in the building. Never in our dreams did we imagine anything like this,” said a relative.

Family members of the Tribhovans said Saurabh had been adopted from an orphanage in Assam when he was just two days old. When he learnt of this recently, he went into a depression. "Saurabh has been undergoing psychiatric treatment for the past two months," said Shivaji Bodke, deputy commissioner of police (Zone XII).

Residents at Prem Sadan Complex where the crime took place allege Saurabh had been showing pornographic films to Parth. They said Parth may have resisted Saurabh's sexual advances which, perhaps, angered the teenager.

While Parth was a Std III student at Children's Academy School, Saurabh had taken the SSC exams as a private scholar.