Nagpur: A 40-year-old man has been arrested here for allegedly hoodwinking his teen daughter into writing suicide notes to implicate his relatives, and then asking her to enact suicide during which he actually murdered her.
The 16-year-old girl was found hanging from the ceiling fan of her house in Kalamna area of Nagpur city on November 6, a police official said on Saturday.
Police registered a case of abetment to suicide against her stepmother, uncle, aunt and grandparents on the basis of five suicide notes found in the room, said the official of Kalamna police station.
But an examination of the victim’s father’s mobile phone during the probe revealed that there was a fiendish plot behind what looked like a suicide.
“In the mobile phone, we found a photograph of the victim enacting a suicide bid. It came to light that he had asked his daughter to act as if she was hanging herself and clicked a photograph, claiming he wanted to teach his relatives a lesson,” the police official said.
“Before that he had asked her to write five suicide notes naming these relatives. When the girl did that and then tied the noose around her neck and stood on a stool as instructed by him, he clicked a photo and then kicked the stool, causing her death by hanging. She died in front of her father and 12-year-old sister,” the official said.
The accused then left the house. He later called police, claiming that he had stepped out for some work and upon return found that his daughter had hanged herself, said the official.
Police initially registered a case of abetment to suicide under the Indian Penal Code against the five relatives. But then the investigators realized that something was amiss.
“After we came upon the suicide enactment photo in his phone, we questioned the man, and he confessed to murdering his daughter. His first wife had ended her life in 2016 and the second wife had also left home,” the official said.
The man, who works as a labourer, was arrested for alleged murder. Police were probing the motive behind the crime, the official added.