Woman killed 10 of family, then self: Cops

JAIPUR: After a preliminary inquiry, the police are theorising that a female member of the household who worked as a nurse first served food laced with sedatives and then injected insecticide into 10 members of a Hindu immigrant family from Pakistan before taking her own life in a village in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur district, a senior police officer said on Monday.

Bodies of the 11 members of the Hindu family, which had moved from Pakistan to India in 2015, were found in a small house on a farm in Jodhpur district’s Lodata Alavata village on Sunday morning. The victims were identified as Budharam (75), Antara Devi (70), their son Ravi, 35, daughters Laxmi and Priya and six grandchildren.

The lone survivor, Kewalram, who reportedly slept in the veranda of the house, survived and claimed that he was not aware of what happened inside the house on Saturday night. He claimed to have seen the bodies only on Sunday morning. The police said on Sunday that they suspected a suicide pact.

“Preliminary probe suggests that the deceased were first given sedatives in food by one of the victims, Priya, who was a nurse. After victims felt unconscious, they were given insecticide injections. The poison mixed directly with blood and they died in sleep,” said Rahul Barhat, Jodhpur’s superintendent of police (SP). “Priya injected the poison in her own body through a cannula (a thin tube inserted into a vein to administer medicine) in her leg,” the SP said.

He said the injections were given in a “very professional manner” and only Priya, a trained nurse, could have done so. The police said there were two possibilities. First, it was a suicide pact. Second, Priya murdered her relatives and then killed herself. The possibilities fit in with the evidence that there were no injury marks on the bodies of any of the victims. The motive behind the deaths, however, is still baffling the police.

The police have found that there had been a dispute between Kewalram and Ravi, the two brothers, and their in-laws for the last couple of years, which was mentioned in a suicide note the police claimed to have recovered from the house. Kewalram and Ravi had married sisters from a Bheel tribal family, whose parents live in Jodhpur city. Their wives went to their parental house with their children a few months ago as the marital dispute deepened, the police said.

“Between 2018 and 2020, both families had filed complaints and counter-complaints accusing each other of harassment,” said another police officer, who didn’t want to be named. Kewalram told police that his family was concerned they could all be arrested in domestic violence case. They were also unsure about getting Indian citizenship if they were arrested, the officer said.