Mass suicide suspected as six of family found dead

RANCHI: A business family’s six members were found dead at their residence in Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh on Sunday morning, with police suspecting it to be a case of mass suicide due to financial issues.

Police said the family’s eldest member, Mahavir Maheswari, 70, was found hanging from the ceiling in a room of their flat. His 10-year-old grandson Aman’s body was found on a bed with his throat slit in the same room.

Mahavir’s wife Kiran, 60, too was found hanging from the ceiling of another room while his daughter-in-law Priti, 35, was lying dead on a bed. The body of the family’s youngest member, seven-year-old Annvi, was found on a sofa in the dining room with pieces of cotton in her mouth.

Police suspect Naresh Maheshwari, 40, was the last to commit suicide by jumping from the top floor of their building. A message saying Aman was “killed because he could not be hanged” was also written in Hindi with on one of the envelopes containing the suicide notes.

Police recovered six brown envelopes containing suicide notes with illness, shop closure, borrowings, disgrace and tension blamed for the deaths.

“The investigation so far indicates that the family members committed suicide. As of now, we cannot rule out the possibility of murder as well,” Hazaribag SP Mayur Patel said. He added the bodies had been sent for postmortem.

“We found Naresh’s body lying on the floor near the main gate of the apartment complex. It appears that Naresh, after ensuring that all members had died, came out of this flat, went on top of the building and jumped off from there.”

Patel cited one of the suicide notes and said financial crisis was the reason behind the suicide. “No particular person was blamed in the suicide notes. It was stated that a huge amount of money… (related to) the business had gotten stuck in the market. The entire family was leading a tensed life,” he said.

“Naresh’s signature on the suicide note and on his chequebook were found to be similar.”

The family, which managed a wholesale dry fruits business, stayed in flat number 303 on the third floor of a four-storeyed building in Hazaribagh’s Khajanchi Talab.

The Maheshwaris’ next-door neighbour, advocate Kailash Agarwal, said his wife saw their main door open and one of the bodies hanging from the ceiling at 5 am. “She then raised the alarm,” he said.

The deaths come two weeks after the mass suicide of 11 members of a family in Delhi’s Burari. Earlier in October 2016, five members of a Noida-based retired army doctor Sukanto Sarkar’s family had committed suicide in Ranchi.

Sarkar and the family had come to Ranchi to celebrate Durga Puja. Sarkar had attempted suicide by stabbing himself but he survived. Five months later, he died of heart attack.

POLICE SAY THEY FOUND SIX ENVELOPES CONTAINING NOTES BLAMING ILLNESS, SHOP CLOSURE AND FAMILY CRISIS FOR THE DEATHS