Police have recovered the body of a woman from a canal in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, suspected to be that of a teacher in an MCD school who was killed by her family at Kanjhawala in outer Delhi over her relationship with a man belonging to a different caste.
Jonti village resident Deepti Chhikara’s brother Mohit, 20, and mother Veermati, 50, have confessed to strangling the 24-year-old and dumping her body in the Ganga canal in Uttarakhand’s Roorkee city on April 19.
They were arrested on Thursday.
Sources said an outer Delhi Police team was in Uttarakhand to recover Deepti’s body. “The team has recovered a woman’s body from the canal at Khatauli town in Muzaffarnagar, which is 80 km from Roorkee,” sources added.
The police have sent the body for a post-mortem and are awaiting DNA test results to ascertain her identity, the sources said.
The sensational “honour killing” came to light after Deepti’s second husband, Lalit Vats, a 25-year-old engineer, wrote an e-mail to a senior Delhi Police official on May 18 reporting that she had been missing since the third week of April.
Lalit claimed that he married Deepti on February 23, but Deepti had concealed it from her family.
Her first marriage was conducted in December, 2011, under family pressure, but she had left her husband within a month.
During initial investigation, Deepti’s family failed to give any satisfactory reply on her mysterious disappearance and later admitted that they feared societal reaction over Deepati’s marriage to a man from different caste.
Mohit and Veermati claimed that Deepti’s uncle Amit, who is absconding, was also involved in the incident.
They face charges of murder, removing evidence and hatching criminal conspiracy under Sections 302, 201 and 120-B of the Indian Penal Code.
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