On Friday afternoon a 24-year-old national-level kho kho player from UP was found dead in Bijnor, UP, her body dumped amid piles of cement railway sleepers less than 100m from her home.
Her body was found with clothes pulled down, her face badly bruised, a tooth broken and her neck had strangulation marks.
According to her family,the UP Dalit kho kho player was murdered after rape, FIR has been filed based on the complaint of her family.
The Dalit woman had represented two big states in north India at national-level events in the past five years in the sport kho kho.
According to her sister, “On Friday, she had gone to a private school for a job interview.” When she didn’t return for hours, her family was worried. “We started looking for her. Around 3 pm, a neighbor said a girl — they thought she was unconscious — was found lying close to the railway line amid cement sleepers. We rushed there and saw it was my younger sister,”
Her father, who works as a daily wager at a sugar mill said that “But my daughter wanted to help the family. So, instead of pursuing her sports career, she trained others. She was studying physical education at a university and used to work as a sports teacher at a government school here. She lost her job in April because of the pandemic,”
The family said that the police refused to file the FIR by saying that the area where the kho kho player was killed, does not come under their jurisdiction, instead, the case comes under Government Railway Police (GRP), they said. The closest GRP station was about 40km away in Najibabad, where the FIR was eventually filed after local BSP leaders intervened. Unidentified persons were booked under sections 302 (murder) and 376 (rape) of the IPC.
The autopsy report did not find evidence of any crime other than murder, said Bijnor SP Dharamvir Singh. “According to the postmortem report, strangulation has been ascertained as the cause of death. No other crime was perpetrated upon her, the report says … Four police teams have been set up to investigate the case,” he added.
The victim’s family said the postmortem report was “misleading”, adding, “She was raped. There is no doubt about it. The state of her body, with disheveled clothes and injuries, is itself evidence”.
Author: Nileswar Roy
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