The postmortem report of the sisters aged 8 and 11 years had on Monday confirmed sexual assault with the elder one. (Representational Image)
Two days after the bodies of two minor sisters were found in bags in a canal in Sitapur, police on Tuesday arrested three persons in connection with the case. The body of the girls’ mother (26), who was missing since the last three days, was found in a river, some 30 km from the canal. Police said the woman was strangled to death and the body stuffed in a bag. The business partner of the woman, Naveen Gupta, has confessed to killing the woman and her two daughters with the help of five of his aides, police said. Gupta, who was allegedly in a relationship with the woman, was arrested along with two of his accomplices, they said, adding that three others are absconding.
Police officers said that Gupta had killed the woman as she was allegedly pressurising him to settle down with her. Her daughters were subsequently murdered to avoid any trace of the crime, they said. On Monday, Gupta had said that on Saturday evening he went with the woman to the nearby Nepalapura market and later dropped her to an auto stand from where she went home.
“Yesterday, after identifying the bodies of the girls and talking to some locals, we had taken Gupta and two of his aides into custody. Today, during interrogation they confessed to committing the murders and the sexual assault. On the information given by the trio, we recovered the body of the woman,” Sitapur Superintendent of Police (SP) Anand Kulkarni said. The postmortem report of the sisters aged 8 and 11 years had on Monday confirmed sexual assault with the elder one. The woman used to run a small boutique — in partnership with Gupta — inside a room attached to her house in Alamnagar locality, where she stayed with her daughters.
“The woman had separated with her husband some years ago and was in an illicit relationship with Gupta. The accused said that he killed the woman as she was forcing him to settle with her. The minor girls were killed to leave no trace, as there was no one else in the woman’s family,” the SP further said, adding that they are still interrogating the accused and more information will come out soon.