Ludhiana: 9-Year-Old Girl Strangled By Mother And Stepfather For Insurance Money

Ludhiana insurance murder: A nine-year-old girl was strangled to death at a cattle-feed factory in Humbran, police said on Tuesday. The girl's mother, Pinky (27), and her husband Narinder Pal (31), residents of Mullanpur Road allegedly killed their daughter by strangling her on the intervening night of June 19 and 20 in a bid to pocket Rs 90,000 of the insurance policy bought in her name in 2018. Both have been booked for murder.

*Trigger warning: This article contains details of physical abuse, harassment.

Pinki’s daughter by her first husband, Bharti, 9, and the accused couple's six-year-old son live with them. Neighbours said Pal did not like Bharti and would often beat her up.

Police said that the family initially claimed that the minor died of natural causes, but the post-mortem report confirmed strangulation. On being interrogated, the woman and her current husband confessed, said police. On the intervening night, Pal, who lived in the quarters of the cattle-feed factory where he was employed, allegedly strangulated his sleeping stepdaughter, while Pinki gagged her with a dupatta

After committing the murder, Pal went back to work. "The couple rushed the nine-year-old to a private hospital when the night shift ended, claiming that they had found the girl lying unconscious in the morning. Doctors declared the girl brought dead,” the assistant sub-inspector Harpal Singh said, Hindustan Times reported.

In the murder case, the police have now lodged a report under Section 174 of the CrPC on June 20, based on a statement of Pinky. The couple had invested 2.5 lakh rupees in insurance policy for their daughter Bharti four years back. “The accused wanted to get rid of the girl. Earlier, Pinki had approached her brother and other relatives asking them to adopt Bharti, but no one wanted to adopt a girl,” Singh said.

The accused couple had revealed during the interrogation that they wanted to solve their financial difficulties so they conspired and killed the girl in her sleep by strangling her with a ‘dupatta’ and in the morning spread the word that their daughter had died. The police has booked the couple under Sections 302, 120-B, 182 and 34 of the IPC at the Ladhowal police station, The Tribune India reported.

In 2017, a Delhi-based woman had allegedly killed her six-year-old daughter as she had seen her holding hands with her lover. The minor had run to fetch her father when she spotted her mother with another man. When the accused asked her to not speak about the incident with anyone and the girl refused, she allegedly slit her throat with help of her lover. Read more about the case here.