A man was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly sexually assaulting and murdering a nurse who worked at a private hospital in Uttarakhand, The Indian Express reported.
The accused man, Dharmendra Kumar, was arrested a week after the nurse’s body was found in a village in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur district, about 20 kilometres away from her hospital in Uttarakhand. The exact date of Kumar’s arrest was unclear.
The man allegedly stopped her while she was returning home after work at the hospital in Uttarakhand’s Rudrapur town on July 30 and then assaulted her.
After the woman left the hospital on the evening of July 30, she was seen on security camera footage taking an e-rickshaw from Indra Chowk in Rudrapur, NDTV reported. Rudrapur is located in Uttarakhand’s Udham Singh Nagar district.
However, she did not reach her rented accommodation at Kashipur Road in Uttar Pradesh’s Bilaspur, about 20 kilometres away from Rudrapur, where she stayed with her 11-year-old daughter, according to NDTV.
The woman’s sister had filed a missing person report on July 31, The Times of India reported. The body of the woman, 33, was found in an empty plot a week later on August 8 in Rampur’s Dibdiba area near the state’s border with Uttarakhand.
“When we searched for her [the nurse], we got to know that she had reached all the way to her village [before being attacked] in Uttar Pradesh,” Manjunath TC, the Udham Singh Nagar senior superintendent of police, told The Indian Express.
Manjunath added: “On August 8, we were informed about the body of a woman having been recovered from bushes in that area. It was soon confirmed that it was the body of the missing woman.”
The police identified Kumar, a resident of Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly, after security camera footage showed him following the woman, The Indian Express reported. The accused sometimes worked as a daily wage labourer at the Uttarakhand town where the nurse’s hospital is located.
The police alleged that the accused man is a drug addict and said he did not know the woman.
“On the day of the incident, he saw the woman going alone,” the newspaper quoted the police officer as saying. “As per our information, he stopped the woman, who fought back fiercely. She was, however, overpowered and… strangled her to death. He also sexually assaulted her. After the murder, he took the woman’s belongings and escaped.”
During the investigation, the police found that the woman’s phone was in Rajasthan. The accused was arrested from Rajasthan’s Jodhpur district
The accused had confessed to the crime, The Indian Express quoted unidentified police officers as saying.
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