A suspect in the gruesome murders of 17 people, mostly children, near India's capital has told investigators he had sex with the dead bodies and ate their organs.
The Times of India said Surender Koli admitted to carrying out the crimes alone and that his employer, businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, who was also arrested and charged, was unaware of the killing spree.
The grisly revelations emerged after the two accused were subjected to "narco-analysis" — including truth drugs, polygraph tests and brain mapping — at a national forensic laboratory.
Results of the tests are not admissible as evidence in court, but are designed to help police with their investigation.
Residents say at least 38 people, mostly children, have disappeared from the area, and that police had ignored their complaints that the children were missing. The killings have dominated the front pages of all newspapers.
The two were arrested on December 29 in New Delhi's affluent Noida suburb after an overwhelming stench led to the discovery of carefully chopped-up body parts in a drain next to Pandher's home.
But Pandher was apparently unaware that his servant used sweets and chocolates to lure the victims to the house, before killing them and raping their bodies, the Times of India said.
Koli, who previously worked as a cook in a hotel, narrated how and when he killed his 17 victims with precision. He also remembered the names of 15 victims, the newspaper said, quoting unnamed investigators involved in the tests.
"Sahab (master) did not know," Koli was quoted as telling investigators, adding the murders were committed when Pandher was away.
Asked what he had done with the missing torsos of the victims, Koli disclosed that he ate some of the organs and cut up others and flushed them down the toilet. The dismembered parts were disposed of separately.
Koli said his first victim was a four-year-old girl. He admitted to trying to eat the child's liver, but said he vomited immediately.
His co-accused, meanwhile, emerged from the tests as a womaniser who used Koli as a pimp to find him prostitutes.
Pandher's family said the reports of the narco-analysis test results were a relief.
"I had always thought Surendra (Koli, the servant) was behind all this. My father used to be out of town for long periods on business," Pandher's 23-year-old son, Karan, told the newspaper.
Police in Noida had been investigating whether organ trade was a motive for the killings because the torsos of the victims were not found and only their skulls, limb bones and clothes were recovered from the sewer near Pandher's house.
But according to the Times of India, Koli might have been trying to cure his "impotency".
India's federal Central Bureau of Investigation said it would begin its probe into the case from Thursday.
"Our director Vijay Shanker has said that we received a notification from the federal government asking us to begin a probe into the killings," a spokesman for the agency said.
"Our office received the notification yesterday (Wednesday) evening," he said, adding the agency will attach the "highest priority to the case" and "probe its entire ramifications."
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