Indian arrested for killing boy in Australia

MELBOURNE: A 23-year-old part-time Indian taxi driver, who kept a three-year-old Indian boy unconscious in the boot of his car and drove around for three hours before dumping him in a field, was on Sunday arrested and charged over the death of the toddler.

Sources said wife of Dhillon Gursewak, who has been arrested, is likely to be charged for helping her husband in disposing off the toddler’s body.

Gursewak, who lived in the same house as the three-old-boy Gurshan Singh Channa and his parents from Punjab, has been charged with manslaughter due to criminal negligence and appeared in an out-of-sessions hearing at St Kilda Road police complex, local media reports said.

Police said Gursewak was not a relative of the toddler though they lived in the same house. Gursewak “placed the child in the boot of his car unconscious but still alive”, Ron Iddles, senior sergeant of the homicide squad, was quoted as saying by the Australian Associated Press.

Iddles, however, did not say how the three-year-old boy became unconscious. “He (Gursewak) then drove up to at least three hours with the child in the boot of the car, eventually stopping at Oaklands Junction, where he placed the child from the boot into the grass and did not check to see if the child was alive, then returned to 28, David Street, Lalor,” Iddles said. Gursewak was refused bail and will reappear in the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday.

Gurshan’s body was found by a council worker on Thursday night, six hours after he disappeared from a rented property shared by his parents with friends and family here. A total of 12 people lived in the house.