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 arrested on Sunday and charged with the death of the toddler.
Sources told PTI that the wife of Dhillon Gursewak, who has been arrested, was likely to be charged with helping her husband in disposing of the body.
Gursewak, who lived in the same house as the boy, Gurshan Singh Channa, and his parents from Punjab, has been charged with manslaughter due to criminal negligence. He appeared in an out-of-sessions hearing at the St. Kilda Road police complex on Sunday, local media reports said.
The police said Gursewak was not a relative of the boy.
He “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. Mr. Iddles, however, did not say how the 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 onto the grass and did not check whether the child was alive, then returned to 28, David Street, Lalor,” Mr. Iddles said.
Gursewak was refused bail and would reappear in the Melbourne Magistrate's Court on Tuesday.
The 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.
Gurshan was in Australia on a holiday along with his parents. An initial autopsy was inconclusive.
