A 13-year-old boy in Amarpatan of Satna district in Madhya Pradesh was killed by his 19-year cousin over a family dispute on Friday, August 16.
The accused also made a fake ransom call to the father of victim to throw the investigation off track, the Satna police have said.
The murder took place on August 16, but the body of the boy was recovered on Sunday morning from a well in an abandoned palatial structure in Maihar, about 25 km from the victim's home, after the accused pointed out the scene of crime to the police.
The accused, Lallan alias Tejwali Prajapati, had taken away the victim, Vikas Prajapati, on his bike on the pretext of an outing on August 16. The boy was killed immediately afterwards. The brother-in-law of Lallan's elder brother is also an accomplice in the crime, the Amarpatan police station in-charge R.P. Mishra told THE WEEK. Lallan has been arrested while hunt for the other accused is on, Mishra said.
The station in-charge, while giving details of the crime said that the grandfathers of the victim and accused are brothers and they stay very close by. There are several disputes among the families including that of land.
Lallan took Vikas on his bike to the scene of crime in the afternoon of August 16 and probably pushed him to the well to kill him. “Prima facie there are no evidences that Vikas was killed before being thrown into the well. The postmortem report will reveal the actual cause of death,” he said
The family kept looking for the boy on August 16 and informed the police only on Saturday afternoon. Immediately afterwards, Amit Prajapati, the father of the victim received a ransom call of Rs 10 lakh.
“The call was made using a SIM obtained with fake identity but we managed to track the accused on basis of the details of phone used and detained him late in night. He then spilled the beans and the body of Vikas was recovered this morning,” Mishra said.
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Locals were anxious and angry following the killing, as earlier this year, in February, twins Shreyansh and Priyansh Rawat were killed after being abducted in Chitrakoot of Satna district. The latest killing led to tension in the area on Saturday, though this later reduced as the news emerged that the killings were due to family dispute.
Meanwhile, ex-chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has attacked the state government over the killing of the boy, saying that despite abduction and murder of twin brothers earlier in Satna the government has not woken up to law and order situation. "Wake up government. How many more parents are to lose children like this?" he tweeted in Hindi.
Woman kills children in Shahdol
Meanwhile in another shocking incident, a woman, said to be mentally unstable, killed her two children by cutting their throats in Koni village of Sohagpur police station in Shahdol district of MP. The woman Guddan Baiga threw the bodies of the kids – Kajal, 10 and Rahul, 7, in the courtyard of the house after killing them on Sunday morning and locked herself in. When her husband returned home, he called the police, who had to cut through the temporary roof of the house to arrest the woman, police sources said.
