A Delhi court on Monday sent a suspected paedophile to judicial custody for 14 days, reported The Times of India. Sunil Rastogi, 38, was arrested on Saturday for sexually assaulting schoolgirls after several complaints were registered against him. He has confessed to sexually assaulting several young girls between the age of 9 and 10 in east Delhi’s New Ashok Nagar area, Ghaziabad and Rudrapur in Uttarakhand.

A tailor by profession, Rastogi was arrested from Rudrapur in Uttarakhand where he lived after leaving Delhi in 2004. He is married with five children, including three daughters. His children are being counselled to find out if he had tried to assault them as well.

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The police said he told his interrogators that he used to target minors. “Whenever he would find any minor girl going to home from school, he used to mislead her on the pretext that her father had sent some clothes or some other articles to give her and take her to an isolated place,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (East) Omvir Singh.

On December 13, a case was registered against an unidentified man after a minor alleged a similar experience. The police starting looking for Rastogi after two more cases of attempted idnapping were registered on January 10 against a man who tried to mislead and molest two minors in the area. Investigators suspected a pattern as they found similarities in the manner the crimes were committed.

“In all the three cases, victims were minors in the age group of 9-10 and it was also revealed that the accused first misled the minors by telling them that their father had given some clothes or articles for them and then he took them to isolated place where he allegedly tried to sexually assault them,” a police officer told the news agency.

The police had zeroed in on Rastogi on the basis of footage from closed-circuit television cameras installed in the area. They said that several cases related to possession of drugs, theft and molestation had been registered against him in the past.