In School Murder, CBI Questioned 125 Senior Students, Took Blood Samples

Gurgaon: Before detaining a student for the murder of seven-year-old Pradyuman Thakur at the Ryan International School in Gurgaon in September, the CBI questioned students of classes 10, 11 and 12 for weeks and also asked for their blood samples.

The Class 11 student, seen on CCTV footage near the toilet where Prayduman was found with his throat slit, was questioned repeatedly before he was held around midnight on Tuesday in the presence of his father. He is in CBI custody and will be questioned over three days, from 10 am to 5 pm.

This morning, a day after the sensational twist to the schoolboy's murder, Ryan International looked deserted with low attendance. Students had to walk through a metal detector as they arrived.

Pradyuman, a Class 2 student, was killed on September 8 when he visited the toilet near his classroom just moments after he and his older sister were dropped off by their father. The senior accused of slitting his throat had been seen with a knife two days before the murder, but inexplicably, no action was taken.

 Over the past month, CBI officials questioned 125 students and teachers in school; parents were called for every questioning.

"Our children were interrogated at school and they had to provide their blood samples too. A lot of senior students from my child's class were also questioned regarding the murder," Pramod Kamboj, the parent of a senior student told NDTV.

It was during these sessions that investigators learnt that the student seen on the CCTV footage was the first to inform a gardener about Pradyuman's body. They also found out that the same teen had been seen carrying a knife before the murder.

Though the student was among five persons seen at the same time as Pradyuman on the security footage, he was apparently not questioned properly by the police because they focused only on the portion of the video that showed school bus conductor Ashok Kumar.

The questioning of various students subsequently revealed that the Class 11 student, struggling with his studies, did not want to sit for an exam that day and had talked about avoiding it. He had also bragged to classmates that the exam would be postponed, that they should not bother studying for it.

When the CBI team took over the case on September 29, amid allegations of shoddy and half-baked investigations by the Gurgaon police, they examined the extended CCTV footage and carried out a forensic examination of the crime scene.