Nov 8, 20193 min read

Darbara Singh: The Army officer Sexually Assaulted 23 Children & had None to Perform his Last Rites

Darbara Singh was a pedophile and a murderer from Punjab. The latter died serving a life sentence and awaiting trials, for some cases still filed against him.

How a Mechanical Engineer turned into a Killer?

Singh inserted himself into the life of criminality since he was fairly young, from his late twenties to his early thirties. What’s surprising is that he was employed with Mechanical Engineering Services (MES), a unit of the Indian Armed Forces at Kapurthala, when the first instance of the same took place.

Singh threw a hand grenade while at the house of one of his senior officers, VK Sharma, at the Pathankot Air Base, injuring the officer’s wife and child as well. This was a result of his short temper after an argument with the officer. Later on, Singh attempted to rape and murder a six-year-old girl. The latter managed to somehow escape and share her experience with the authorities that need to hear it. An identifier that the little girl gave the police was that Singh had a parrot in his house, following which the police found Singh and arrested him.

Following this, Singh was sentenced to life imprisonment but was unfortunately acquitted by the High Court of Punjab after about a decade of his conviction. This arrest and acquittal took place towards the early nineties. 2004 was the year that Darbara Singh partook in most of his sinister activities for which he came to be known as the Baby Killer. In a period spanning about seven months, April 2004 to October 2004, Singh abducted about 23 children of non-Punjabi migrants in his locality.

He kidnapped these children at specific times when he knew that the parents were out working their laborer jobs at construction sites and the likes. While this amount of children came out during his confession, authorities were reluctant to believe that this was all.

There were other areas close-by that followed a similar Modus Operandi as did the Baby Killer, and it was suspected that he was behind those as well. This was not proven.

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Out of the 23 children that Singh abducted, body parts of a few were found here and there, in his consequently terror-stuck locality. 17 of these 23 innocents were killed by their abductor and assaulter, while the rest of them managed to escape or were rescued by the police.

All of these children were aged between 3 years and 10 years, an age highly susceptible to being lured with the kind of snacks that children love - sweets, juice, etc., because children are innocent and do not know any better.

Investigation with the help of a Sketch:

Sometime towards the end of October, the police received a tip after releasing a sketch of the man, that someone who resembled the sketch had been seen with a bag of toffees, picking up children on his bicycle. The police found Singh somewhere near Bastian in Jalandhar on his cycle, after receiving this information. After Singh’s conviction during interrogations, he revealed some annoying things in his confessions. He confessed to necrophilia after he murdered the children, and he also told the police about how he celebrated with alcohol and a good meal after an assault.

A person must be extremely damaged psychologically to look at such horrendous crimes and feel no remorse for it. The way Singh saw it, his sins were all a conquest that he enjoyed being a part of.

Death:

Eventually, he was put in prison for two of his murders to serve a life sentence. While in prison, he still had pending cases against him. He could never be tried for a lot of them because he fell sick and passed away at a government hospital in April 2018.

The rest of his family refused to claim his body and wanted nothing to do with him even after he died. Singh’s wife, years before he had begun his “conquests,” had already asked him to leave the house because she did not like the way he behaved at all.

When Singh died in April 2018, in the middle of serving his life sentence, he had no family members at all who were willing to claim his body. Darbara Singh was eventually cremated by the police, and that is how his life of horrendous crime ended.

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