Hyderabad: Police, on Saturday, October 4, arrested the maternal uncle and aunt of a seven-year-old girl whose body was found in a water tanker at her grandparents’ house in Hyderabad on Wednesday.
The accused have been identified as Mir Sami Ali and Yasmeen Begum, residents of Chowni in Yakutpura.
Sami Ali had financial disputes with the victim, Ummehani Sumaiya’s mother and her sister, Shabana Sultana. The couple also suspected the family practised black magic after their three-year-old daughter died of ill health in November last year.
They had developed a grudge against Shabana and her children due to the latter’s frequent visits to their house, which led them to plan the victim’s murder, police said.
On September 30, Shabana visited her brother’s house with her children, but soon left for some work. Ummehani Sumaiya stayed back playing with her cousins.
Shabana returned at 5:30 pm and saw her child playing. She left again at around 7:15 pm with her sister to the Dabeerpura Railway station to get ticket reservations.
This time, when she returned home late at 10:30 pm, her daughter was missing.
A missing persons complaint was registered the same day.
Investigations reveal that between 7:20 pm and 7:40 pm, when Shabana left to book train tickets, Sami Ali and Yasmeen Begum gagged their niece’s mouth, tied her hands with a bedsheet and threw her in the water tanker on the first floor of the house.
Police recovered the brown tape roll, a pair of scissors, a piece of brown tape affixed on the child’s mouth, Sumaiya’s slippers, the bedsheet and pieces of her cloth.
A case had been registered under section 137(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) but was later changed to 103(1), 238 BNS on October 1.
The couple were arrested and produced before the court on Saturday.
