A 20-year-old woman in Telangana’s Jogulamba Gadwal district was strangled to death by her parents after she refused to terminate her pregnancy, and for being in a relationship with a man from lower caste.
Bhaskar Shetty and Veeramma were arrested on Monday. According to the police, the couple allegedly smothered their daughter with a pillow, while she was asleep in their house in Shantinagar village of Kalakuntla in Jogulamba-Gadwal district, The Hindustan Times reported.
They sought to project heart attack as a cause of her death. Villagers, however, raised suspicion over the parents’ version of the incident, as they had observed marks on her neck.
When a police team went to their house and insisted on a post-mortem after noticing some marks on her body, the parents tried to avert the situation, stating it as unnecessary.
Later, police shifted the body to a hospital where a post-mortem revealed the woman was ‘throttled to death’.
‘The post-mortem revealed that she died of suffocation. We arrested the couple and produced them before the court, which remanded them to judicial custody for 14 days,’ police inspector J Venkateshwarlu said.
During interrogation, the parents confessed to killing their daughter.
According to the police, the deceased belonged to the upper caste and was in a relationship with a man belonging to a caste among the Other Backward Classes (OBC), whom she met while she was pursuing her final year degree course in Kurnool district of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh.
She had returned to her native during the lockdown period.
Youngest of the three daughters, the woman was taken to a hospital by her parents, as she missed her periods. She was found to be 13-weeks pregnant, after which parents decided to undergo an abortion.
She initially agreed, but later declined, following which the parents resorted to killing her, fearing she might elope with the man. They allegedly smothered her in the early hours of June 7, while their two other daughters slept in an adjoining room, the police informed the media.
