Updated on: 16th MAY 2023 03:18 PM IST | Mumbai
S S NADAR | news@debotimes.in

According to the police, the boys strangled the victim, smashed his head with a stone, and slit his throat with a knife. They, then, stuffed the body in a polythene bag.

Three boys, the youngest of them 11 years old, allegedly killed their 12-year-old friend who had objected to his older sister’s reported relationship with one of the accused in a village in Madhya Pradesh’s Seoni district. The police said the three strangled the boy with a cycle chain and later smashed his head with a stone, and slit his throat with a sharp knife on Sunday.

Ramji Shrivastav, Superintendent of Police (Seoni), told The Indian Express the three accused are aged 16, 14, and 11 respectively, and include two brothers.

“It is a stunning case because the 16-year-old accused had grown up watching romantic shows which ended in breakups and were scared of losing the girl. He told me during questioning that he was scared of a breakup. They belong to a village and don’t know English words so I asked him what does a break-up mean. He told me ‘it means your heart breaks down’ and I was shocked. These boys were inspired by local crime shows and planned to murder the boy to avoid a breakup,” said Shrivastav.

The local police have registered a case under sections 302 (Punishment for murder) and 120-B (Punishment of criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code. The police have said the three boys have been detained and sent to a correctional home. Further investigation is underway.

The victim’s father told The Indian Express, “My son had objected to the three boys who had molested my elder daughter some time ago. He told them that if they do that again he will tell their parents.”

The father of the deceased had recently lost his job and had been staying at home for the past two months with his wife and two children, an elder daughter, 14, and his son.

The boy’s mother had asked her son to help charge her mobile phone. He plugged her phone into a charger and left home at 1 pm on Sunday. “We thought he had left home to play in the village,” the boy’s father said in the First Information Report (FIR).

Around 5 pm, their neighbour raised an alarm asking the victim’s parents to come over. When they arrived they saw a boy’s legs sticking out from a polythene bag which was dumped on a pile of pebbles near their house. After the mother identified her son by his trousers, they took the body out and found his face covered in blood.

“There was a cycle chain wrapped around his neck along with a blue nylon rope. He had a deep cut on his neck which was made with a sharp edge weapon and cut marks on his nose and forehead,” the father told the police.

The father of the deceased spotted blood stains which led to the house of the 16-year-old accused. He along with some other people from the village reached the house of the accused and confronted the boy, who allegedly confessed to the crime and told the villagers that he lured the boy to his home where the two other accused joined them and killed the boy with a knife and stones.

The police said the accused had lured the boy under the pretext of playing, offered him a piece of jalebi, and later attacked him with a knife. They then packed the boy into a gunny bag kept inside the bathroom.

“The boys were thinking of ways to dispose him of. Since the floor made of mud was covered in blood they tried to dispose of evidence by smearing cow dung over it. Then they cut their trousers with a scissor since they had blood stains. They heard the victim stir inside the bag so they attacked him with stones and slit his throat with a butcher’s knife,” SP Shrivastav said.

The boys then tried to dispose of the body and spotted a girl passing through the area and panicked. “They hurriedly disposed of the body. We are going to involve the local child welfare associations and speak to the parents of this village to monitor what their children watch on social media,” he added.