Chandigarh, January 18: The family of the prime suspect in the brutal rape and murder of a junior classmate said that the couldn’t have committed the crime. The 18-year-old was found dead and his body was found on Tuesday night from a canal near Jyotisar.
“He couldn’t even kill a rat,” the family said, the Hindustan Times reported.
The teenager was found dead a week after he and the 15-year-old Dalit girl went missing from Jhansa village in Haryana’s Kurukshetra. The Class X student’s half-naked body was found on Saturday from near the bank of a canal in a village in Jind district after she had gone missing since last Tuesday. She was brutally assaulted, her private parts mutilated and some of the vital organs ruptured, police had said. (Also read: Haryana Girl, Who Was Brutally Gangraped in Jind, Wanted to be a Doctor)
“When police kept repeating he was the killer, we tried to convince ourselves that he could have behaved against his nature,” said his uncle.
Even though he was the prime suspect, the family continued looking for him. “When the girl’s body was found, we suspected he, too, could be killed,” said the uncle, adding police didn’t believe them. “But we searched for him along railway tracks and in the canal from where the girl’s body was found,” he said.
It was on Tuesday night that one of his cousins got to know that a body had been found in a canal, 25km from Jhansa. “He checked a tattoo on the decomposed body and confirmed it was our boy,” the uncle said.
Both went to the same school and the girl was his two classes junior. Both belonged to the same village, were Dalits and even had same tuition teachers.
While the boy’s father paints houses for a living, the girl’s father is a tailor.
Kurukshetra Superintendent of Police Abhishek Garg said that the two were in touch. The claim has been denied by the girl’s parents but supported by some of boy’s relatives.