Kindergarten student among five of a family slaughtered in Aizwal home

According to an eyewitness and neighbours, the accused murderer Laltlanchhuaha entered the house of Sangliansiama around 7.30 pm after which an argument ensued, and the accused slashed 57-year-old Sangliansiama with a sword he appeared to have carried with him.

A young woman staying with the family as a domestic help who escaped the massacre said she attempted to help the patriarch of the family when Laltlanchhuaha turned on her. She shoved a table against him and ran into the bathroom and locked herself inside.

What followed afterward remains sketchy but Laltlanchhuaha appeared to have turned on the other members of Sangliansiama’s family, cutting down his wife Khualthangi (also 57 years old), their adopted son Isaac Lalrinnunga (6) and their relatives Vanlalchhungi (54) and 14-year-old Samuel Lalrinchhana, who was staying with them at the time as he studied in a private school in the same building. Vanlalchhungi’s son Hriatpuia, not yet 30 years old, was away at the time.

After this Laltlanchhuaha appeared to have jumped about 40 feet from the building’s balcony to land on the tin roof of a shack downstairs, injuring himself and unable to make a run for it when male students of the school’s hostel caught him and brought him upstairs to the main road.

Some neighbours had gathered by then and set upon the accused, but a handful of police arrived and took him into custody and kept him inside a nearby house.

As the news spread through social media, thousands gathered at the crime scene where a mob demanded the accused be handed over to them, clashing with just a few dozen policemen and some locality leaders who arrived early.

In spite of local authorities, police, civil society leaders and the neighbourhood pastor making appeals to stop the mob, some miscreants pelted stones and the house was badly damaged as a handful from the mob broke walls and windows to enter and search for the accused. Police reinforcements trickled in and was able to form a perimeter after more than an hour. The victim’s bodies were later moved from the crime scene in coffins, neighbours shouldering them to the hospital for a post-mortem.

The stand-off continued till about 3 am when news broke police had slipped through with the accused and presented him before a magistrate who remanded him to judicial custody.