A day after a four-year-old boy went missing from his house in Kadiyapattinam village in Kanyakumari district, he was found murdered and his body stuffed in the almirah of a neighbour on Saturday.
Preliminary inquiries by the police revealed that Fathima (27), whose lives one house away from the victim, murdered Johan in her attempt to rob his 1.4 sovereign gold chain.
Tense moments prevailed in the coastal village on Saturday as villagers who were agitated over the heinous crime ransacked her house. The police stepped up security arrangements to bring the situation under control. “We have altered the missing case that was registered by the Manavalakurichi police on Friday to a case of murder on Saturday and arrested Fathima,” deputy superintendent of police for Colachel sub division P Thanga Raman said.
Autopsy will be performed on the boy’s body in the Kanyakumari medical college hospital on Sunday. Johan is the elder son of Richard (35) and Silja (31). While Richard works abroad the boy was under the care of his mother who had given birth to a girl child only last month. Fathima lived in her own house with her husband and two children and was well known to the victim and his family.

The DSP told TOI that the boy was playing with other children on the road near his house on Friday afternoon and went missing under mysterious circumstances. His kin and villagers who could not find him till the late hours of Friday also circulated pictures of the boy in the social media, seeking help from netizens to trace the boy. Meanwhile his parents lodged a complaint with the Manavalakurichi police.
During inquiry the police came to know that the village had CCTV cameras on all the roads leading to the village and confirmed that the boy was in the village. The police narrowed down their suspicion on four persons of the village suspecting that they could have kidnapped the boy for the gold chain he was wearing. The police narrowed down on Fathima after they ruled out the others.
Fathima had borrowed money from many villagers and was struggling to repay them. As she was picked for questioning on Saturday afternoon she claimed innocence and tried to turn the blame on a couple of other persons. Meanwhile the villagers suspected that he could be in her house and barged into the house along with the police to search. Shocked to find him dead in the almirahs with his mouth and limbs tied, they ransacked her house.
Johan was playing in front of the Fathima’s house on Friday afternoon. The woman called him in and he followed as she knew this aunty well. As she snatched away his chain he tried to raise his voice and the woman gagged him and the boy became motionless. The woman then tied him and hid the body in her almirah. “She confessed to the crime only after the body was retrieved from her house,” the DSP said.
The police said that they are probing to find if her kin or anyone else had a role in the crime.