Policemen take out the MP4 player from a basket

Suri, Aug. 19: The teenager who had allegedly pushed his friend’s sister 30 feet below from a bridge and then strangled her to death for an MP4 player was produced in a juvenile court in Calcutta today and sent to a home for delinquent children.

Ten-year-old Shiuli Dolui had refused to lend Nikhil (name changed) the MP4 player that belonged to her brother.

Police in Suri, about 230km from Calcutta, have charged the 14-year-old with murder.

Before leaving Suri police station for Calcutta at 4.30am today, Nikhil said he had his own MP4 player but had given it away to a friend. “If I could give away my MP4 player to a friend, why could Shiuli not giver hers to me? Moreover, the gadget was defective and one could only listen to songs and not watch video files,” the Class VIII student told a throng of reporters.

Then he called up his mother over a phone handed to him by his brother Tapas, who is in Class IX. “Don’t worry Ma,” he mumbled and broke down in tears.

Nikhil’s father, a group D employee at the Suri Sadar Hospital, and mother had left for an undisclosed destination soon after his arrest.

The police broke open a door and found the red palm-sized MP4 player in a basket where Nikhil kept his schoolbag and other belongings. It was wrapped in a plastic packet and kept in the schoolbag. Nikhil had told the police he had hidden it there.

An officer said Nikhil faced interrogators with a straight face. “We could not trace any hint of emotion or fear on his face. When we asked him about lunch yesterday, he casually said he was hungry as he had had nothing since dinner the previous night,” said officer Manab Chakraborty.

“Last night, after interrogation, he took dinner as if nothing had happened. He broke down for the first time while talking to his mother.”

Around 4pm on Sunday, Nikhil had allegedly asked Shiuli to bring the MP4 player with her and accompany him to the nearby Tilpara barrage.

He told her he would take pictures using the camera in the gadget. As they approached the barrage, Nikhil asked for the MP4 player. When she refused, he allegedly pushed her off the bridge. The police said he then went down to check if she was dead and strangled her when he found her breathing.

The Chinese-made MP4 player found last night had a white paper pasted with the name Shiuli written on it.

Swapan Dolui, who paints buildings and had strained his purse strings to buy the Rs 2,000 gadget for his children, is not interested in taking it back. “What will I do with it. My daughter is gone,” he said.

In the absence of a television set, it was the only source of entertainment for Shiuli and her brother Sagar.