On Sunday, September 19, a 17-year-old teen’s body was found hanging from a tree under mysterious circumstances in Haiderpur, Shalimar Bagh area in Delhi. While the police claimed that it was a case of suicide, the bereaved family members of the deceased teenage boy and members of the Hindu outfit Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) have termed it a murder.
The boy’s family has stated that he was romantically involved with a local Muslim girl and her family has killed the boy.
According to Alok Kumar’s father’ Hariram, his son went missing on the evening of Friday, September 17. The family started searching for him after he did not return home. They searched the entire night but could not trace him. On Saturday, the body of Alok was found hanging from a tree near a hotel in Haiderpur. The family of the deceased boy has accused the girlfriend’s family of murder.
Hariram told the police that the girl had called Alok on Friday and asked him to meet somewhere. She had asked him to leave his mobile phone behind in the house. Hariram revealed that the girl and his family was pressurising him to leave his family and marry her. Alok was, however, unwilling to buckle to the pressure.
Hariram also confirmed that the girl’s father had threatened him that his son would not be spared.
The police, however, stated that the autopsy report states suicide as the cause of death. The family of the deceased, on the other hand, are hell-bent that their son was murdered in cold blood and hanged to the tree by the members of the girl’s family.
According to a report by TOI, the CCTV footage of the locality showed Alok’s girlfriend and her friend first going to Alok’s house then later leaving the house with him.
The deceased boy’s sister alleges murder by his Muslim girlfriend’s family
OpIndia has acquired a video in which Alok Kumar’s sister Jyoti is heard naming the girlfriend’s father- Rehmat Ali, mother, uncle and aunt namely- Parvez and Salma, and her older sister Roshni as accused in the crime.
She added that the girl’s relatives had assaulted them and threatened to kill her brother. When Hariram along with Alok’s other family members had gone to the girl’s residence to inquire about his son’s whereabouts, the girl’s kin had beaten them up, said Jyoti.
Here the father of the deceased teenager who is sitting in the crowd showed his wounds, saying that he was assaulted by the girl’s family.
Jyoti went on to further reveal that the day Alok went missing, they wanted to go to the police station to file a missing complaint, but their neighbours had discouraged them saying that the police would not accept a missing complaint before 24 hours.
Alok’s sister said that they went out looking for Alok the night he went missing. They had, in fact, spent the entire night looking for him. Jyoti furthered that they went to the same location from where Alok’s body was recovered the next day. She claimed that they checked the area not once, but three or four times but Alok’s body was not there on Friday evening. Their father visited the particular spot early next morning too, but Alok was not there, said Jyoti, implying that Alok was murdered elsewhere and his body was hung there later.
After the news of the incident spread, VHP members reached the spot and staged a protest. They demanded capital punishment for the accused.
A repeated pattern?
Though the police insist that it is a suicide, there have been numerous cases of hate crime where non-Muslim lovers of Muslim girls have been killed in cold blood by their families,
Last year in October, an 18-year-old boy named Rahul was beaten to death in Delhi’s Adarsh Nagar by Mohammad Afroz, Mohammad Raj and three others over an alleged love affair with a Muslim girl.
In another gruesome incident in Delhi, Ankit Saxena was brutally stabbed to death by the family members of his girlfriend Shehzadi on February 1, 2018.
