- Wednesday, November 27, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
A man has been arrested in Kupwara district of the northern Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir on Monday (3) for allegedly killing his eight-year-old daughter five days ago.
According to a report by NDTV, the accused, identified as Mohammad Iqbal Khatana, brutally murdered the minor girl named Uzma by strangling her and slitting her throat after she had come in the way of his plan to commit suicide following a domestic quarrel with his wife Nageena Begum, something which had become a routine affair in the couple’s life.
A senior investigating officer said Iqbal, a 45-year-old driver by profession, confessed to having killed his child after his plan to take his own life did not succeed.
According to the report, the minor did not let her father go alone after the latter left home with a knife following an argument with his wife. She accompanied her father and got into his vehicle when he tried to drive away to take the drastic step.
Investigators said for 45 minutes, Iqbal tried to convince the girl, one of his four children, to leave and also gave her some money to buy candies. But when nothing worked, Iqbal lost his cool and killed his daughter, sources in police in Kupwara said.
After strangling her, Iqbal allegedly slit her throat and put the body in a firewood storage shed, the NDTV report cited police sources as saying.
“He placed the body in the shed in the supine position (chest facing upwards) and then slit her throat with the knife, so that the blame falls on the occupants of the adjacent houses,” a police officer was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India.
According to the police, Iqbal had changed his mind to kill himself after murdering his daughter.
He returned home a few hours later and hid the fact that the girl was with her. But the police found eyewitnesses who said that she was with him.
When Iqbal went to the police station and filed a missing report about his daughter, his family confronted him about her, according to the police.
The family also recovered the body of the girl from the firewood storage by the time Iqbal returned from the police station.
Thousands of people gathered for the child’s last rites and sought severe punishment for the accused father, the report added.
(With PTI inputs)
