Rae Bareli:
There has been another brutal honour killing, this time in a village in Rae Bareli, Uttar Pradesh. A 17-year-old class 11 student was allegedly killed by her own father, who wanted to ensure that she did not elope with the man she loved.
Police said Ram Baran Yadav, 45, of Binhaura village had confessed to killing his daughter with an axe in a fit of rage when he spotted her sitting with the young man, Neeraj Yadav, near a canal. Neeraj managed to escape. Mr Yadav, who is a farmer, has been arrested and the axe he used to allegedly kill his daughter has been recovered from his house, the police said.
"We got information that the girl was killed with an axe. During initial investigation, we suspected both the men - the father as well as the lover. But after more investigations and interrogations, we recovered the axe from Ram Baran's house. After we got the murder weapon, Ram Baran confessed that he killed his daughter," Senior Superintendent of Police, Laxmi Narayan Srivastava, said.
Ram Baran Yadav is barely audible, but almost matter-of-fact as he says, "She was in love with Neeraj. We tried to make her understand, we tried very hard to make her understand that she should get married to who we find for her. But she continued her affair and ran away. I didn't want her to elope and get married, so I killed her."
A distraught Neeraj says the two planned to get married. "We were in love for two years," he said, adding that about 15 or 20 days ago, the girl had left her home to stay with him. But, he said, she was forcefully taken away. "For five days she lived at my house. Then four people came to my place and forcefully picked her up. When she resisted, they carried her away on their shoulders. Then she disappeared. Today, she had called me to meet her."
It was when the two met that Mr Yadav spotted them and killed his daughter, the police said.