Pune Crime Files | Extensive legwork, technical leads: How Pune Rural police solved a case of rape and murder of 2-year-old girl in 48 hours

A brutal rape and murder

What followed was an extensive search conducted across eight villages in the area, as senior police officers also joined the operation. The police received the first lead when a rickshaw driver told them he had dropped a man and a girl of that description to a location in a neighbouring village. A woman from a neighbouring village further pointed the police in the direction where the man was seen taking the girl.

A day after she had gone missing, the girl was found dead in a cement pipe next to a bridge on a road connecting two villages. Autopsy revealed that the girl had been brutally raped and murdered.

The police, which had registered a kidnapping case, added the provisions related rape of minor, murder, destruction of evidence and provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act.

After the first lead

Abhinav Deshmukh, who was the superintendent of police for Pune Rural at the time, formed eight teams and launched an extensive probe. The teams started working on the preliminary description of the suspect, and combed remote hamlets in hilly regions spread across over a dozen villages. Some of these hamlets did not even have motorable approach roads.

After their extensive legwork, the police received a possible location where the suspect could have been hiding. Subsequently, working on technical leads and ground-level police work, the investigation team found out that the suspect was hiding at a brick kiln on the outskirts of a village in the Mahad taluka of the state’s Raigad district.

Within 48 hours after registration of the case, the Pune Rural police arrested Sanjay Baban Katkar, 38, a brick kiln labourer. Katkar had been hiding in a small hut at a brick kiln on the outskirts of Nate village in Mahad. After his arrest, Katkar denied any link to the case, but confessed to the crime following sustained interrogation. He also showed the police where he had disposed of the victim’s body and the location where he had dumped his jacket, which he was wearing at the time of committing the crime.

The police probe showed that Katkar worked at a brick kiln near the victim’s village and had kidnapped her from her house while passing through the area.

During the fact-tracked trial of the case in a Special Court for Pocso cases, as many as 16 prosecution witnesses were examined along with circumstantial evidence gathered by the investigation team, including the results of DNA analysis. In the judgment pronounced in the last week of February 2022, the court sentenced Katkar to death under Section 6 of the Pocso Act.