Two days after cops stop burial, father, brother held for smothering 19-year-old woman to death in West Delhi

Officers said that the man from Siwan reached Delhi on Friday and was questioned by the police. According to officers, he had allegedly informed his cousin in Delhi about the killing earlier this week, who then called the police just before the family was preparing to bury the body.

“We used to buy vegetables from her father…. But we did not talk much. That day my wife heard her mother crying. We asked what happened… her mother said something about cancer,” said Naushad, an electrician who lives in the neighbourhood. When her father was asked about the death, they were told she died of typhoid, Naushad claimed.

Another neighbour recalled how the family locked up the teen in the days before her death.

An officer said the teen, days before she died, had threatened to leave home and told her parents that she would elope with the man from Siwan. After this, the house — which now remains locked — saw frequent fights.

On April 1, the janaza (procession before the last rites) was headed around 2 pm to the nearby mosque, Badi Masjid, and it was joined by members of Naushad’s family. As the crowd proceeded towards the mosque, a team of policemen rushed around 2:30 pm. “They came with a young boy and stopped the burial. The boy was saying something about murder. After they took away the body, we got to know that she was killed. Even as there were frequent fights, we never thought that a murder could happen,” recalled Naushad.

Gulfam, who lives on the floor above Md Islam, said that most people in the family were reticent. “We didn’t even know that the father was a vegetable vendor. We only went because they are neighbours,” he said.

The postmortem report on Thursday had confirmed that the teen was smothered to death.