62 year old BAMS practitioner, mastermind in over 50 murders; Arrested

Informing PTI about the arrest and the charges against the ayurveda doctor, the police official said that the practitioner may have been involved in more than 100 murder cases but could not confirm the exact figure as the cases registered against him in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan were investigated by the state police concerned.

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Devender Sharma, 62, a Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS) degree holder, hails from Purreni village in Uttar Pradesh's Aligrah district and he was apprehended by Delhi Police''s Crime Branch team six months after jumping parole in a murder case.

The police said that Sharma was convicted in several cases of kidnapping and murder. He was arrested twice earlier for running a fake gas agency in Uttar Pradesh and was also jailed for running a kidney racket in different states.

"Sharma was serving life sentence in Central Jail, Jaipur in a murder case and was out on parole for 20 days in January this year after spending 16 years in jail. But he jumped parole and stayed at his native village for a while before moving to Delhi in the beginning of March.

"Earlier, he was living in the house of an acquaintance at Mohan Garden and then, he moved to Baprola where he married a widow and got into property business. Our team arrested him after we received information about his hideout on Tuesday," said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Rakesh Paweriya.

After getting his BAMS degree from Siwan, Bihar, he started his clinic in 1984 in Jaipur. Later in 1992, he invested Rs 11 lakh in a gas dealership scheme but was cheated and suffered a financial crisis. So in 1995, he started a fake gas agency at Chhara village in Aligarh and later got involved in criminal activities, he said.

"His accomplices robbed trucks carrying LPG cylinders by killing the driver. They unloaded the trucks in his fake gas agency and then the robbed truck would be dismantled in Meerut and the bodies of the drivers were dumped in Hazara Canal, Kashganj which had crocodiles, so there was no chance of retrieval of the bodies," the DCP said.

In some cases, he sold the robbed taxi to customers at Kashganj and earned Rs 20,000-25,000 for every such sale, he said.

In 1994, Sharma also got involved in an interstate kidney transplant racket which was running in Jaipur, Ballabhgarh, Gurgaon and other places. He and several other doctors were arrested in 2004 in the Gurgaon kidney racket case, the officer said.

From 1994 to 2004, he claimed to have carried out more than illegal 125 kidney transplants done for which he got Rs five to seven lakh per case, he said. In 2001, he once again started a fake gas agency at Amroha but was arrested again.

After this fake gas agency shut down, he went to Jaipur and ran a clinic there till 2003. During this period, he got in touch with his accomplices who used to hire taxis to Aligarh and then killed the drivers at secluded places and dumped their bodies in crocodile infested waters in Hazara canal, Kashganj.

His interrogation that started on Tuesday went on till morning the next day. The police said he remained calm and cooperated with the team, disclosing details about his involvement in several cases.

During interrogation, he also confessed to being the mastermind of more than 50 murders. He was arrested for several murder cases reported in 2002-2004 but was convicted only in only six-seven cases. His wife and children left him in 2004 after they came to know about his activities, he added. Sharma came to Delhi with the intention of starting afresh and married his distant relative who knew about his criminal background, the police officer said. He began a property business and was currently mediating the sale of Marshal House in Connaught Place to a property dealer in Jaipur, the police said.

He confessed about his involvement in 45-50 such cases registered in police stations of different states, he added, the DCP said. Sharma told the police that he lost count after 50 murders and it became difficult for him to remember the exact number of the killings.

The Jaipur police have been informed about the arrest and the custody of the accused will be handed over through court, police said.

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