2 women of Bihar shelter home die, two staff arrested

patna — Two officials of a Patna shelter home were detained on Sunday for questioning after two women inmates died in a hospital, police said.

Patna Senior Superintendent of Police Manu Maharaj said that a Special Investigation Team has been constituted to probe the death of the two ‘Aasra’ inmates, aged 40 and 18, on Friday night at the Patna Medical College and Hospital.

The cause of the death was not immediately known.

Though shelter home officials said the two died at the hospital, the latter’s officials on Sunday denied it and said that the inmates were “brought dead”.

Neither police nor the Bihar Social Welfare Department officials were told about the incident on Friday by the shelter home authorities.

A police team along with departmental officials visited the shelter home in the city’s Rajiv Hagar area and questioned the staff there.

The two deaths at the Bihar shelter home have come after the revelations about the rape of at least 34 minor girls at a similar home in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district.

The case came to light in July when the Social Welfare Department filed an FIR on the basis of a social audit by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Twenty-four girls were rescued from a shelter home in Uttar Pradesh’s Deoria last week after one of them told the police that they were being sexually abused. —