Barely few months later, on July 15 last year, her father got a call from the police. He was told that his daughter was found dead at her rented accomodation. Her body was lying on the bed. A chair was also on the bed, suggesting she committed suicide by hanging herself from the ceiling fan.
Although no suicide note was found, the Aurangabad Town police station concluded it was a “clear case of suicide”. The distraught father kept insisting it was murder but the matter was closed just as “UD (unnatural death) case”.
A month later, when Daljit Singh joined as new Superintendent of Police of Aurangabad, the father pursued the case with him. Singh saw merit in his arguments and visited the spot. The police team found a piece of rope tied to the bolt of the back gate and also a torn piece of cloth on one of the iron bars of the balcony fence.
“We started working on these clues and suspected that the rope was used to bolt the rear gate as well to confuse the police,” SP Singh said.
The SP, who pulled up the case investigation officer for shoddy investigation, first arrested the girl’s collegemate Hemant Kumar after neighbours confirmed that he used to visit the girl.
Hemant spilled the beans, saying he and two more students of the same college had raped and killed the girl, the police said. He identified the two others as Ravi Kumar and Vinay Kumar, a Dharamshala resident. Ravi and Vinay were arrested on Thursday.
Police said they confessed that they visited the girl on July 13 last year and raped her. “After the girl threatened to expose them, the three used her scarf to strangle her. They put a chair on the bed to mislead the police. We found that the girl’s height was not good enough to reach for the ceiling fan even after using the chair on the bed,” the SP said.