Nalanda journalist’s son killed, his eyes gouged out; five detained

A Special Investigation Team (SIT) has been formed to look into the murder and a forensic laboratory team has collected some evidence from the spot.

The incident took place at Hasanpur village of Harnaut police station when Ashwini Kumar (15), son of Dainik Hindustan’s Nalanda bureau chief Ashutosh Kumar Arya, went missing at 1 pm on Sunday. While Ashutosh Arya lived at Harnaut block town, his son had been living with his grandmother at the village.

Arya was informed after Ashwini’s grandmother could not find any trace of him. Several villagers began searching for the boy and they finally found him dead in a village pond. There were, however, “no other injury marks on any other part of the body”, police said. Police are waiting for the postmortem report.

Nalanda SP Nilesh Kumar said, “The postmortem report alone would reveal if the death is because of drowning or shock… There is no ligature mark around neck to suggest strangulation.”

The SP said that Arya told the police that Ashwini would “behave abnormally at times”. “Though we cannot say anything with conclusion as of now, we can only suspect that the boy could have done something and was attacked brutally. But it is all speculation,” said the SP.

Asked if it could be because of a family dispute, the SP said the journalist’s brother Bhurelal Singh, who has criminal antecedents, had been out on bail for sometime. “But we have not found any lead so far,” he said.

DIG Rajesh Kumar said preliminary probe suggested the murder had nothing to do with the profession of the victim’s father.