The girl’s grandfather at their Meerut house. (Photo: Gajendra Yadav)
A 10-litre can of cooking oil, a sack of flour and packets of dry fruits lie stacked in the corner of a house in Meerut’s Shiv Puram. The raw ingredients for a wedding feast will now be be returned after the bride-to-be and her father were shot dead—two days before the ceremony.
The house is now crowded with relatives and friends paying condolences to the garlanded photographs of Raj Kumar (48) and daughter Anchal (19).
The FIR filed by a relative, Aman, 21, says the two were killed on the night of June 27— allegedly by a stalker, who wanted to marry Anchal.
The main accused, Sagar Thakur, a neighbour, was arrested on Friday after a brief encounter, and the police said he reaffirmed the motive as mentioned in FIR.
Bhrampuri Circle Officer Chandrakant Tripathi said: “Sagar has confessed that he planned to murder her since he loved her. We have arrested five people, including Sagar’s mother. One accused remains absconding.”
The FIR states: “Our neighbour Sagar Thakur had a one-sided love affair with my sister, Anchal. He did not take in the fact that she was getting married to another person. To put pressure on us… along with four others, opened fire at us with the intention to kill. The bullets hit my sister, my father and my brother. My sister and father succumbed.”
Anchal’s mother Usha, 40, maintained that the murder motive was linked to an altercation between the victim’s family and the accused during Diwali last year. CO Tripathi, however, dismissed that as a motive.
On the night of June 27, the siblings were dancing in the drawing room, and Anchal can be seen grooving joyfully in a recorded video. Seconds later, gunshots are heard and a commotion ensues, the video shows. According to family members, Sagar and four others came with guns at their doorstep and shot Rajkumar, lying on a bed outside.
As the children rushed outside, the accused shot Anchal thrice. She died instantly.
“They knew whom they had to shoot, and how,” Usha said. “They did not give anyone any notice. They did not want to injure her—they wanted to kill her.”