A day after five-year-old Jennifer Juliet and her younger brother, Robin Christopher (3), apparently drowned in a water tank, their mother on Wednesday confessed to murdering them.
This comes after their father, John Kumar, had expressed suspicions about the manner in which his kids died at their rented house at Koorankad, near Palakkad's Kozhinjampara.
From accident to murder
At the time of their deaths on Tuesday, the police had said that the siblings had been home alone with their mother, Nivedya.
She told them that she had been cooking food in the kitchen when her kids had been playing inside the house. However, she claimed she noticed that the children had been missing for a while, after which she had found them inside a water tank attached to a bathroom outside the house.
It was suspected at the time that the children had entered the bathroom while playing, and had accidentally fallen into the tank, which is around three feet tall and was reportedly full of water.
The locals had immediately taken the kids to a hospital in Athani, but neither of them could be saved. Jennifer is an LKG student at the Menonpara UP School.
DSP Sasidharan told Manorama Online that the probe had also revealed the reason Nivedya killed her kids: it was because she reportedly felt that the children would be an obstacle to her future life.
The report added, citing police reports, that the elder child, Jennifer, was first drowned when she was bathing, after which the younger child was also drowned.
They added that the incidents preceding the kids's deaths also pointed to their murder by their mother.
