Man nabbed for staging son’s murder in Bihar's Bettiah

BETTIAH: Cracking a week old gruesome murder case that threatened to ignite a communal and political tinderbox ahead of the Bihar polls, the Bettiah police investigations led to the arrest of a father-son duo on Monday. It turned out that the ‘murder victim’ was one of the alleged perpetrators.
“On August 22, a decapitated, disfigured, the head was discovered near a mosque near the industrial area. The next day, other mutilated parts of the corpse were found near the corn factory on the BIADA campus itself,” Bettiah SP Nitasha Gudiya said, recalling the sequence of events.
She added, “The face and other parts were mutilated and were unrecognizable. One Akhtar Hussain then claimed to have recognized the remains as that of his 22-year-old son Abdul Khalid Hussain based on the clothes.”
Hussain lodged an FIR naming Garima Sikaria, the co-convener of the Bihar BJP local bodies cell along with her entrepreneur husband Rohit Sikaria. Garima, also the chairperson of the Bettiah Nagar Parishad, had been inducted into the BJP by the then party chief Amit Shah during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
Hussain is alleged to have been embroiled in a land dispute with the Sikarias. “ Rohit Sikaria was handed a plot on lease by BIADA over which Hussain was earlier encroaching,” the SP said.
“For two days, we were fighting a grim battle to prevent a communal conflagration,” the SP told TOI, adding that she found certain discrepancies in the father’s account after taking up the supervision of investigation herself.
“First, only the father claimed to identify the body. Then, the dead body had white strands of hair which seemed unlikely in a 22-year-old deceased. The case seemed bizarre,” she told this newspaper.
The informant and his family initially declined to receive the dead body after autopsy insisting on the arrest of the Sikarias. Late in the night on August 23, they finally buried the body in a cemetery close to their Lalu Nagar home near the industrial area. “The informant had sent his son to Delhi after the murder. We traced him there,” the SP said.
The CPI-ML even convened a dharna seeking immediate action in the murder case. “In our protest against this gruesome murder, the CPI, CPM, Congress and RJD too lent support,” CPI-ML leader Sunil Rao told TOI. “We too have been deceived by the conspiracy,” he lamented after learning of the SP’s disclosure.
“There has been some deep-rooted political conspiracy,” Rohit Sikaria told TOI.
While the unearthing of the alleged real culprits may have prevented communal and political overtones from snowballing, Bettiah police are saddled with another question: Whose dead body was it?
Tightlipped, the SP said that four persons, including the Hussain father-son duo, have been arrested. “ We shall now file another case into the murder of an (as yet) unidentified man. Our investigation has not ceased,” she said.