Man kills wife, baby in front of 2 other sons

THE MAN SUSPECTED

HIS WIFE HAD AN AFFAIR AND THAT THE YOUNGER SON, AN 18MONTHOLD INFANT, WASN’T HIS OWN

NEW DELHI: A woman and her 18-month-old son were murdered in northwest Delhi on Monday night allegedly by her husband in front of the couple’s two other sons, police said on Tuesday.

Police said the husband, Om Prakash Kumar, is on the run. He allegedly spent the night with the corpses and the two children, aged six and four, before leaving the house at G-block in Jahangirpuri around 6am on Tuesday.

The two children were awake when he hit their toddler brother on the head, apparently with a hammer, and stabbed their mother five times in the chest and abdomen with a dagger between 9pm and 11pm.

The boy bled to death as the blow caused multiple skull fractures. The man suspected his wife’s fidelity and thought the youngest child was not his, police said.

The woman, 30-year-old Shobha, was stabbed as well as hit with a blunt object.

“The suspect did not harm his other two sons. The six-year-old boy told us that he was afraid, turned his head and fell asleep. The other child is too young to describe what happened,” an officer said.

According to Aslam Khan, the deputy commissioner of police (northwest), the crime came to light around 8.30am on Tuesday when Kumar’s father, Khubi Ram, went to his son’s room on the first floor to use the washroom and found the bodies on the floor.

Ram told police his elder grandson was sitting on a trunk and looking at the bodies when he went in. “The child was not crying and his brother was sleeping,” he said.

Kumar, who painted homes for a living, married Shobha 13 years ago and the couple allegedly quarrelled often. The woman had filed a dowry harassment and domestic violence case against Kumar in 2010, but withdrew it later, officer Khan said.