MUMBAI: The serial killer stalking the streets of South Mumbai is getting bolder. On Saturday morning he struck again, claiming his eighth victim, bludgeoning a 20-year-old unidentified youth to death.
The body was found by policemen in a secluded spot between Churchgate and Grant Road. The killer had struck on Friday morning too, killing another youth just a kilometre away near the Wankhede Stadium railway foot overbridge.
“We found a 10 kg stone that was used to crush the victim’s head,” a senior police officer told DNA. “From the food packets and some leftover chicken curry found at the site it seems that the victim was first offered food before being killed.”
The police, however, are awaiting the post-mortem report to establish whether the serial killer had sexual intercourse with his victim. All his previous victims were sexually assaulted before being killed.
“The stone appears to have been brought by the killer in a gunny bag, which we recovered from the site,” said the officer. “We have discounted the possibility of the bag belonging to the youth, who appears to be a rag picker, as it was clean. A sack used for collecting scrap and garbage would have been dirty.”
Police officials involved in the investigation feel that the killer is a South Mumbai resident who knows all the secluded spots in the area.
A serial killer on Mumbai's streets killed yet another person last night; making the latter one of five young men murdered recently. The body of a 20-year-old unidentified man was found in a secluded spot on the railway tracks between Churchgate and Grant Road, his head was crushed by a 10 kg stone. A senior police official said that they had found food at the crime scene, indicating that the victim had been offered it before being bludgeoned.

The police are awaiting the post-mortem report to confirm whether this victim, like the others before him, had been sexually assaulted before being murdered. This attack comes just a day after another body was found a kilometre away, near the Wankhede Stadium rail bridge. Police say that the perpetrator may have claimed up to eight lives so far, although his role has only been confirmed in four cases. The killer, suspected to be a man in his late 20s, targets young, male ragpickers in South Mumbai, killing them in the early morning and leaving a beer can at the scene of the crime.

Although the latest killing appears to be the work of the same man, Railway Police officials are wary of declaring this homocide as the work of the same perpetrator, saying there were "similarities as well as differences in the modus operandi of the murderer". Mumbai Police have established a 90-man team tasked with nabbing the serial killer, who a senior police official compared to Raman Raghav, who bludgeoned 9 pavement dwellers in their sleep in the 60s.