Jilted lover behind Indore blaze arrested
Police have arrested a jilted lover, who had started a fire in a three-storey residential building in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, as a revenge on a woman who spurned his marriage proposal, an official said on Sunday.
The fire claimed the lives of seven people while nine were injured. The woman and her mother staying in the building were evacuated safely.
“Initially, it had appeared that a short-circuit caused the fire. But, after scanning CCTV footage of the houses near the gutted building, the police found that a man ignited the blaze by setting fire to a vehicle in the building’s parking area. The flames spread and engulfed the three-storey building,” an official said.
The accused, Shubham aka Sanjay Dixit, 27, had fled after allegedly torching the scooter of the woman residing in the residential building in Vijay Nagar locality on Saturday after she rejected his marriage offer.
The accused was nabbed on the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday and booked under Indian Penal Code Sections 302 (murder) and 436 (mischief by fire intending to cause destruction of any building), the police said.
Dixit tried to flee but fell on the road in Lohamandi area and got injured, Indore’s Vijay Nagar police station in-charge Tehzeeb Qazi said, adding that the man was being questioned.
Dixit, who originally hails from Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, was working in a private firm in Indore for the last couple of months, the police official said.
Meanwhile, a video surfaced on social media purportedly showing Dixit, with his hands and legs bleeding, lying on a stretcher in a hospital in Indore, writhing in pain.
Qazi said Dixit was injured when he tried to climb a road divider to evade arrest.
The accused had vacated a rented flat in the building six months ago. He wanted to marry the woman who lived in the same building, but she was going to marry another person, the police said.
After setting the woman’s vehicle on fire, Dixit fled to his friend’s place in Niranjanpur area and later moved to Lohamandi area, the police said.