Ahmedabad:
The young man's claim that he had watched his girlfriend being brutally killed in Ahmedabad by a gang that first tried to rape her, evoked comparisons to the 2012 Delhi gang-rape. But within 36 hours, 25-year-old Balbir Prasad find himself accused of the murder.
The police said Prasad stabbed his girlfriend multiple times, then wounded himself, and cooked up a "Nirbhaya"-like story that was splashed across newspapers.
What clinched his guilt, the police say, was a letter that the police found in his bag.
"The letter said he was committing the crime as he had been humiliated by the girl and her family,'' senior Ahmedabad police officer Manoj Aggarwal said today.
On Wednesday, Prasad told the police that he and his 22-year-old girlfriend were chatting near railway tracks when four drunk men made sexual advances on the woman. She fought them and then the men stabbed her several times, stabbed him and ran away, he claimed.
Soon, the police found that Prasad could not answer questions like why the men let him off with a superficial injury after stabbing the woman so brutally. There were also no bloodstains on his clothes. It was evident that the wound was self-inflicted, the police said.
"Initially, we took Prasad's statement and treated it like a rape and murder bid but several inconsistencies emerged. We had also called the police control room stating that two bodies were at the spot. But there were gaps in his description of the alleged attackers," Mr Aggarwal said.
The police said Prasad was upset that the woman left him after her parents rejected him.
On Wednesday, he came down from Mumbai, where he was based, and asked the woman to meet him. The police will question Prasad to piece together what happened.