In a horrific incident, a 16-year-old girl was brutally murdered by a man named Saiyed Ali as the girl rejected his advances. The incident happened in Baghuda village bordering Sikandarpur in Uttar Pradesh’s Ballia district.
According to Hindi media reports, the victim was staying at her maternal grandfather’s house and had gone to harvest the crops in the field with her friends at around 4 pm. Saiyed Ali, a dailywage laborer, had followed her to the spot, pushed the girl to the ground and slit her throat.
Saiyed Ali fled the scene and threw his knife at a distance before the victim’s friends could reach for help. However, the villagers nabbed him and handed him over to the police.
Meanwhile, police have recorded the statement of the girl’s grandmother and her friends. Superintendent of Police Devendranath stated that Saiyed Ali had pursued the girl one-sided. Apparently, the girl, daughter of one Suresh Sahni, was an acquaintance of Ali but had stopped talking to him after he returned to his village from Delhi on November 12. Saiyed Ali assumed that the girl was in a relationship with another man and wanted to avenge it.
Police were deployed in the area amid tensions as the accused was a Muslim and the victim, a Hindu.
The incident comes just days after Ballia police arrested Imran, who had lured a Hindu girl into a love by hiding his religion. Imran tried to flee the village with the girl, hiding the fact that he belonged to a Muslim community. However, the villagers caught him and handed him over to the police.
With rising cases of love jihad, the Uttar Pradesh government has enacted a law to prevent such crimes. The first under this law case was registered on November 29 against a man named Owais Ahmed for attempting to forcibly convert a girl to Islam in Bareilly.