Four members of a Muslim family, including a woman, have been accused of killing a member of their own family – a teenage girl – because she fell in love with a Hindu boy, who was also killed by them. The killings took place in the West Champaran district of Bihar on the night of November 27.
The girl was named Noor Jehan Khatun and the boy was named Mukesh Kumar, and both were studying in class IX. They had been in love for a few months, to which the girl’s family was strongly opposed.
According to a report by The Hindu, boy’s father received an anonymous call that their son’s body was lying in a sugarcane field. The boy’s father and uncle immediately reached near the field and saw from a distance that bodies of a boy and a girl were indeed lying in the sugarcane filed surrounded by six-seven people.
The girl was still alive and gasping for breath when they reached the spot, Mukesh’s father claims, but they couldn’t gather courage to go in the field due to presence of those people. The following morning i.e. on November 28, they went to the field again but the bodies of the boy or the girl were not there.
The police also started investigating the case and later the mutilated bodies of both the boy and the girl were recovered from two different places away from the village. Later, on the basis of complaint by Mukesh’s father, police arrested the elder brother of the girl Allauddin Ansari, and her two uncles Gulsanovar and Ansari Miyan. Girl’s elder sister Shabnam Khatun is also accused, but absconding.
According to a report in local Prabhat Khabar newspaper, Allauddin accepted the crime during interrogation by the police, and conceded that he, with help from his two uncles, had killed his sister and her lover.
This is not for the first time a Muslim girl or woman has been ‘punished’ with death by her family members for choosing a Hindu as her life partner. In June this year, a pregnant Muslim woman was burnt alive by her family in Karnataka for marrying a Hindu man, while a Hindu man and his Muslim wife were killed in broad daylight by woman’s brother in Uttar Pradesh in November 2014.
There have been other occasions when only the man has been ‘punished’ like in September this year when a Hindu man was killed in Andhra Pradesh for being in relationship with a Muslim girl. In March 2015, a Hindu man in Bihar was also killed as he ‘dared’ to marry a Muslim girl.