The two minor Dalit sisters, who were found hanging from a tree in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district, were allegedly raped and strangulated before being hanged, police said a day after the incident.
Six accused were arrested and charged under sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), 2012. They were identified as Chotu, Junaid, Sohail, Hafizul, Karimuddin and Arif.
The two girls, aged 15 and 17, had been lured to a farm nearby and allegedly raped by two of the accused, Sohail and Junaid, said Lakhimpur Kheri Superintendent of Police Sanjeev Suman.
When the girls demanded that the accused marry them, Sohail and Junaid along with Hafizul allegedly strangulated them, and then hanged them from a tree, police said.
Meanwhile one of the accused was injured after he was shot in the leg in an alleged encounter with the police Thursday morning.
Earlier, the Dalits in the region and the girls’ family accused three men of rape and murder.
The incident happened under the Nighasan police station limits of Lakhimpur Kheri district.
The mother of the girls told media that she suspected her daughters were murdered. Three youngsters of the neighbouring village on a bike abducted the two girls from near a hutment while the two sisters were cutting fodder, alleged the mother.
“I was bathing inside the hutment when three youths of the neighbouring village arrived, one in a yellow T-shirt, another in a white one and the third in a blue T-shirt,” she said.
“I saw three youths forcibly taking away my daughters on a motorcycle. I ran after the motorcycle but failed to catch them,” she added.
Bhim Army chief and Dalit icon Chandra Shekhar Aazad who shared a video of two girls on social media said the incident happened on the second anniversary of brutal caste-based rape and murder of a Dalit woman by upper-caste Hindus in UP’s Hathras.
Reacting to the incident, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav in a Twitter post in Hindi said: “The kidnapping of two Dalit sisters in Nighasan police station area, their murder and after that the father’s allegations against the police that their post-mortem was done without a ‘panchnama’ and consent is very serious. After farmers in Lakhimpur, this is a heinous repetition of the ‘Hathras ki Beti’ killing.”
Expressing her grief over the incident, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra slammed the state government and said, “The incident of murder of two sisters in Lakhimpur (UP) is heart-wrenching. The relatives say that those girls were abducted in broad daylight. Giving false advertisements in newspapers and TV every day does not improve law and order. After all, why are heinous crimes against women increasing in UP?”
