Mukeem cried as we hit him, but there's no regret

The macabre account of how and why Amir and Sarfaraz allegedly killed Mukeem

"Kuchh reaction nahin tha. Itna sab hua, phir bhi!" the counsellor who spoke to one of the two accused, Sarfaraz Shaikh (17, in sketch), arrested for the kidnap and murder of his friend Mukeem Khan (17) told this paper. After speaking at length with Sarfaraz, who is at Dongri children's home, the counsellor said he showed no remorse.

"Amir thought Mukeem's father, Akbar, was a rich man, and so Mukeem was the perfect choice. Two days before kidnapping Mukeem, we visited the spot at Kalina (crime scene) to see if it was isolated enough to dump his body.

We lured Mukeem by telling him that we planned to get hold of the maths paper. On the day of incident [February 13], Amir, Mukeem and I met at the open ground near our college. On the pretext of collecting the leaked paper, we took Mukeem to the isolated spot at Kalina.

On reaching the spot around 10 am, Amir and I hit Mukeem on the head with a hammer three to four times and began throttling him. Once he was on the ground, we straddled his chest and continued hitting him. I know Mukeem was shocked. He was crying, 'I am your friend, why are you hurting me?' Mukeem's cries did not bother us and we have no regrets. We just wanted to get into engineering. We also tried to inject air into his neck, but were not successful. Mukeem was bleeding badly, but suddenly stopped crying. We knew he was dead and wrapped his body and threw it in the river.

We then used Mukeem's mobile phone to call his father and demanded a ransom without disclosing our names. We did not inform him where to deliver the money, though he kept pleading with us. We asked his father to wait for our call the next day. I then went to college and attended the science practical examination, after which I went to a cyber cafe and reached home late in the evening.

My father, Rafiq Shaikh, a tuition teacher, asked me why my shirt was torn and dirty, so I told him an incident had happened during the practical examination.u00a0

However, the next day, my father told me to confess the truth or else he'd commit suicide. He had learned
from my college that there was no incident during the practical exam and that Mukeem was missing. I finally narrated the truth and he took me to the police."

A senior police officer refused to comment, stating that they were probing the case from all possible angles and were gathering evidence to support the statements of the accused.

"We [Amir and Sarfaraz] are poor in mathematics and knew we had to get our hands on the paper before we appeared for the HSC exam. We did not know whom to approach or how to get hold of the paper, but we knew that a lot of money was needed to pay a middleman. For that, we had to kidnap someone from a rich family. The leaked paper would help us get good marks in math and we could then get admission into automobile engineering. The idea to kidnap and kill Mukeem was Amir's and was hatched almost a week before the kidnap."