Muslim girl killed by her father and brother for being in ‘relationship’ with Hindu boy.

Honour killing in Bengal: Muslim father and brother kill girl for eloping with a boy of Hindu faith.

Jayita Sen | HENB | Kolkata | Sept 12, 2018:: In a suspected case of honour killing, a Muslim girl was strangulated and mutilated by her father and brother in Purba Burdwan district, West Bengal, for being in a ‘relationship’ with a Hindu man.

The duo, residents of Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, were arrested from Kolkata on Monday by Purba Burdwan district police, a senior officer said.

Police who on 31st August recovered the body of a woman whose face was mutilated with a stone, from a bush off Nabagram Durgapur Expressway around 19 km from Burdwan, said “During the post-mortem, we found some numbers jotted near on her thigh, following which we got hold of the man with whom she was in a relationship.”

The Muslim girl Jahana Khatun (19 yrs) had a relation with a Hindu boy named Kiran Kumar (20 yrs) of same village of Chak Alhadad. Though Kiran left his village over a year and shifted to Mumbai in his work-place the duo used to continue their relationship through mobile chat and they met each other at Nagpur and Mumbai, as reported.

The family members of the girl were giving continuous threat to Kiran not to keep further relationship with Jahana. But the lovers could not cut off their affairs anyway. Recently, family of Jahana started severe torturing on her and sometimes she was kept in chains put on her legs.

A police team then reached the Hindu boy’s residence in Mumbai, who then provided the police with all the necessary details of the girl’s residence and family members. This helped the police to nab her father Muhammad Mustafa and brother Muhammad Jahid, who worked as drivers in Kolkata and used to stay at Beniapukur area near Park Circus.

Being enraged with the affairs between a Hindu boy and a Muslim girl, Mustafa and Jahid hatched a plan to kill Jahana inviting her to come to Kolkata for a settlement of a marriage with Kiran. But, Jahana could not understand the cruelest motive of her father and brother to kill her so brutally.

The two admitted to killing the girl with a rope inside a moving vehicle, while they were taking her back to Jamalpur and then dumped her body in the bush after defacing her face with a stone, the officer said.

Though this is a suspected case of honour killing, the police are also probing whether there were other reasons behind her killing.

This is not for the first time where a Muslim girl or woman has been penalised with death by her family members for choosing a Hindu as her life partner. In June last year, a pregnant Muslim woman was burnt alive by her family in Karnataka for marrying a Hindu man, while a Hindu man and his Muslim wife were killed in broad daylight by woman’s brother in Uttar Pradesh in November 2014.

There have been several instances also where the man has been castigated for being in a relationship with a Muslim girl or woman like the one we reported late last year where four members of a Muslim family, including a woman, had been accused of killing a member of their own family – a teenage girl – because she fell in love with a Hindu boy, who was also killed by them. Similarly, in September last year, a Hindu man was killed in Andhra Pradesh for being in a relationship with a Muslim girl. In March 2015, a Hindu man in Bihar was also killed as he ‘dared’ to marry a Muslim girl.

In another such incident, in February this year, a Hindu boy named Ankit Saxena was brutally murdered in Delhi for being in a relationship with a girl named Shehzadi from the Muslim community. The alleged murderers were relatives, including parents, of the girl. The Ankit Saxena case particularly gained gravity because this went on to become a classic example of varied media houses’ bias reporting where mainstream media tried to conceal the religious identity of the girl’s family.

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__Inputs from Op India.