12-year-old girl is seventh victim of Ghaziabad feud that began in ’89

The naked body of a 12-year-old girl with her throat slit was found in Ghaziabad on Tuesday — the seventh murder in a 26-year-old rivalry between two farming families, police said.

A 25-year-old neighbour and his mother were arrested after the police followed a blood trail to their home in the Bhojpur area, where they also found the victim’s half-burned clothes.

The girl stepped out of her home alone at 5pm Monday to go to a weekly market and never returned. Her family called the police at 10pm and launched a search with their help. Her body, stuffed in a gunny bag, was found the next morning in a pond close to the house of the accused, Deepak Chaudhary.

“The walls and floor of his house had traces of blood and someone had tried to clean them. We also found her blood-stained clothes burnt by the accused. His mother, Naresh, was at home and had helped him dispose of the body,” said SP Rakesh Kumar Pandey.

Police said Chaudhary had confessed. “When I saw the girl alone, I remembered her family had murdered two of my uncles. I nabbed her, gagged her and dragged her to my house, where I strangled her.”

“When she died, I took out a kitchen knife and slit her throat,” Chaudhary told the police.

He also told them he had set her clothes on fire and “wanted to dispose of the body some place far away” but ended up dumping it outside the boundary wall of his house due to the night-long search.

The police said the rivalry started in 1989 with the murder of the victim’s 23- yearold cousin, which her family blamed on Chaudhary’s family. In the 17 years that followed, there were five more killings with the victim’s family losing three more members and Chaudhary his uncles. Before the minor was killed on Monday, the last murder took place in 2006.