2 teenage girls killed for ‘family honour’

GREATER NOIDA: Fired by an anachronistic notion of family honour, a 22-year-old man pulled the trigger on two cousins — aged 14 and 16 — because they had gone on an outing without telling the family.

The killings happened in Surajpur village of Greater Noida on Thursday when the accused, identified by police as Sonu, confronted his cousins with a .315 calibre countrymade pistol. He first shot Sonam, a class X student. He then reloaded his gun as a terrified Pinky, a class XII student of Dadri Inter College, watched, and shot her.

Although Sonu tried to flee the murder scene, he was unrepentant when the cops caught him. “In ladkiyon ne parivar ki naak katwa di (these girls have sullied the family’s reputation),” he told cops.

This was the second such killing within two months in Surajpur. On September 18, in the Dankor police station area, a 16-year-old girl and her 18-year-old paramour were lynched by the girl’s family.

According to district police chief R K Chaturvedi, Sonu had told the cops the girls had sneaked off to Aligarh last Saturday. The family tracked them down and brought them back on Tuesday but the girls refused to say whom they were with.

The crime occurred in a neighbourhood where three brothers – Srichand, Gopichand and Om Prakash – live close to each other. Srichand and Gopichand run general merchandise stores in the market and Om Prakash owns a medical store. The brothers also have several tenants in several rooms, in their houses.The victims were Gopichand’s daughter, Sonam, and Om Prakash’s daughter, Pinky. Sonu is Srichand’s son.

Chaturvedi said, “The girls had disappeared for the second time in two months. This time, Sonu and the other relatives reached them, in Aligarh, because they had phoned a boy in Surajpur and asked him to join them in Aligarh.” Sonu and the extended family learnt of the phone call and went to Aligarh where they found the girls at the railway station.

“After the girls were brought back, they were kept shielded from Sonu, as he is very hot-headed. But on Thursday afternoon, he found the girls and brought them to Om Prakash’s house, where the three were alone. There, in a tin shed in the verandah, Sonu shot them when they again declined to reveal names of the persons they had gone to meet,” Chaturvedi said.

Family members, who arrived at the spot on hearing shots, rushed the girls to a hospital. Sonam died instantaneously and Pinky was declared dead at a hospital.