Gurugram school murder: Bus driver says cops pressured him to ‘confess’

GURUGRAM : Saurav Raghav (32) lives in a one-room house near Government School, Bhondsi. His mother, Anita Raghav, sits on the doorstep of their house every day, waiting eagerly for her son to return home. She has already lost her younger son, Gaurav Raghav, at the age of 19. “Saurav is the only bread winner in our family. Along with the principal and two teachers, he was taken to the police station for questioning on Friday. He called me at 6.30pm saying he was being interrogated by police.”

Here’s Raghav’s version of what happened that day. “Like any other day, Ashok (

Kumar

, the accused) and I reached the school at 7.50am with the kids in our bus. After parking it in the bus bay, I went to play cards with other drivers, as we do every day. I have no clue when Ashok left, or whether he went inside the school or anywhere else. Within minutes, all of us heard loud screams from inside the premises. Some teachers screamed, saying, “Saurav, start the bus”. But before I could do that, we saw the kid,

Pradhyumn Thakur

being taken to the hospital in the school’s WagonR. I waited to see who was carrying the kid, and saw it was Ashok holding the kid in his arms, his shirt all drenched in blood. Ashok said he’d carried the kid from the washroom, where he got injured. I have no idea when and how Ashok reached the washroom.”

Raghav goes on to say the school doesn’t have a separate washroom for bus drivers and conductors. He accepts Ashok frequently used to go to the washroom inside the school, and that they had asked him not to.

About his experience at the police station, Raghav says he was scared. “The first thing they asked was for how long Ashok was working with me. I told them, since February. I also said by nature he’s very nice and soft spoken.”

Raghav spoke of the presure put on him by Haryana Police. “At around 10.30pm, a relative of the school principal entered the interrogation room and said, “Ashok has accepted the crime and has named you as accomplice.”

He added that he also told his interrogators he’d no clue where the knife came from, that he’d have known had Ashok brought the knife into his bus. “I was not beaten by the cops, but they put crushing mental pressure on me to accept I was Ashok’s accomplice.” He was released around 1.15am on Saturday morning.