Wife stabbed to death by husband, one-year-old son found alive next to her

A 1-year-old boy was found alive beside the lifeless body of his mother who was allegedly stabbed to death by her husband who hanged himself in Jadagiri area of Kukatpally suburb of Hyderabad. The boy’s incessant cries alerted neighbours on Friday morning and the rented flat’s owner living on the ground floor, broke the door and found the boy lying in a pool of blood that emanated from his mother’s lifeless body lying beside him. Cops suspect that the incident occurred Wednesday night and that the little boy spent nearly two days in between the dead bodies of his parents. As the doors and windows were closed, none of the neighbours heard the boy’s cries until Friday morning.

Police found a suicide note written in Kannada by the husband Manjunath, 30, who claimed in the note that he and his wife Meena Rani were undergoing several financial crisis and thus decided to end their lives. The couple had moved to Hyderabad from Kolar in Karnataka five months back and had taken a first floor flat on rent on Sai Prasanna Nagar in Kukatpally. Quoting the suicide note, officials said Manjunath and Meena had fallen in love several years ago but their families did not agree to their marriage. “Meena was married off by her family to someone else and Manjunath later married another woman.

But five months ago, they eloped and came to Hyderabad without divorcing their respective spouses and were living in a rented flat in Sai Prasanna Nagar. While Meena started working as a salesperson at a cloth store, Manjunath used to do odd jobs. In his suicide note, he mentioned that lately he started suspecting that Meena was having an affair with a colleague at the cloth store and that they were regularly having arguments over her proximity to her male colleague.

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He mentioned that the couple was also under severe financial difficulties. From phone call records we found that that Meena also called  up a relative living in Hyderabad asking for money on Tuesday but she never went to the relative’s house to collect the money. We found her body lying in a pool of blood besides her son, Harsha, while her husband was found hanging from the ceiling fan. We suspect that she was stabbed as there was blood around her,’’ an official said.

Cops have sent both bodies for autopsy. “The little boy was initially taken care of by the neighbours who gave him bottled milk, a bath after which he fell asleep. He is right now at a Government Child Welfare where relatives from his mother’s side have also arrived,’’ the official said.