Bengaluru woman Sujatha Bhatt's claims of her daughter's disappearance after a college trip to Dharmasthala in 2003 were proven false on Tuesday.
This comes days after she released a photo online with her lawyer present, claiming it was a picture of her daughter Ananya.
An Asianet Suvarna News report points out that what Sujatha showed was a picture of someone else's daughter.
The report added that she did not even have a daughter named Ananya.
In the early 2000s, Sujatha was widely known to be living in Ripponpet, Shivamogga, with a man named Prabhakar Baliga.
Local media even described the pair as "childless animal lovers": a portrayal that contradicted her narrative of raising Ananya—a first-year MBBS student.
Following her reported split with Baliga in 2006, Sujatha moved to Bengaluru, where she worked in a private hospital, and allegedly met a man named Rangaprasad.
With Rangaprasad's wife reportedly dead by then, Sujatha began to live with the man, who already had a daughter and a son (named Srivatsa).
The report explained that Srivatsa's wife Vasanti, who worked for many years as a nurse at the Ramaiah Hospital, returned to her native place following marital problems. She reportedly died by suicide in 2007.
The report added that the evidence pointed to Sujatha using a picture of Vasanti in her twenties—and claiming that it was the photo of Ananya, whom she said had been missing since 2003.
Sujatha's claims of submitting a complaint at the Belthangady police station have also been debunked by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) in charge of investigating the alleged burial of hundreds of bodies at Dharmasthala by a sanitation worker.
She later even claimed that she had been abducted and tortured, which put her in a coma for some time.
Out of 17 spots pointed out by the sanitation worker—who claimed to have buried multiple bodies in Dharmasthala between 1995 and 2014—only one spot offered up partial skeletal remains.
This has also sparked speculations of the alleged buried remains being washed away.
Home Minister G. Parameshwara, who had earlier warned of action being taken against false complaints, said on Tuesday that the forensic analysis of dead remains recovered is currently awaited.