New Delhi: A 21-year-old Delhi woman, whose body was found stuffed in a travel bag in Uttar Pradesh’s Mathura three days ago, was shot dead allegedly by her father who was upset over her choice to get married without the family’s approval.Some news reports have it that the reason the family was unhappy with the marriage was that the man belonged to another caste.The woman’s mother knew about the killing and had helped the father in disposing of their daughter’s body along the Yamuna Expressway here in the early hours on November 18, police said.Both the parents have been arrested and sent to jail, while the weapon used in the crime has been recovered, police told reporters. Police have labelled the crime a case of “honour killing” – a term used for murders, usually of women and girls, by their families or community members who claim the formers’ exercise of choice in personal matters has brought “dishonour”.The news comes immediately after the brutal killing of a young woman, Shraddha Walkar, by her live-in partner, Aftab Poonawala, inspired nationwide debate in which several voiced the opinion that women should trust the judgement of their parents. Walkar’s parents had allegedly disapproved of her choice to be in a relationship with Poonawala.Several on social media have pointed out that the Mathura murder points to the problems of following such a dictum.“Ayushi had a fight with her father on November 17. She had got married to a man of her choice because of which her family was unhappy. Enraged over this, her father had shot her twice on November 17 after the argument,” acting Senior Superintendent of Police Martand Prakash Singh said.After Ayushi died, her mother Brajbala helped her father Nitesh dump the body on a service road in Raya near the Vrindavan cut along the Expressway, some 150 km away from their Badapur home.“The parents had kept the body in their house (at Modband village in Badarpur, Delhi) during the night and left home around 3 am in their own car…” Singh told reporters.The body, which was wrapped in plastic sheets, was found in the morning of November 18 after locals alerted the police about it.The parents have been booked under Indian Penal Code sections 302 (murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information, to screen offender).After the FIR was lodged, 14 police teams were mobilised into investigating the case and they traced phones, checked CCTV footage, used social media and also put up posters in Delhi to identify the woman.Concrete information about Ayushi, however, was received from an unidentified caller on Sunday morning, and later, her mother and brother identified her through photographs.They also arrived at the mortuary here and confirmed it was Ayushi’s body, police said.The family is a native of Baluni in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur and migrated to the national capital after Nitesh Yadav found a job there.“The woman was an adult and had chosen on her own to marry a man, identified as Chhatrapal. They had got married in an Arya Samaj temple and her family was unhappy because of this. She would also leave home often without informing her parents,” Singh said.He added that Ayushi had been staying with her parents in Delhi.Earlier on Monday, the Delhi Commission For Women (DCW) took suo–motu cognisance of the case and issued a notice to the Mathura police, seeking the copies of the FIR and the autopsy report along with details of her accused father Nitesh Yadav by November 24.(With PTI inputs)
