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Taunts drove mom to murder
07/03/2008 14:12 - (SA)
New Delhi - An Indian woman claimed she had drowned her two daughters, aged four and nine months, because she was harassed by her husband and his family for bearing only girls, news reports said on Friday.
The bodies of the two girls were found floating in a pond on Tuesday at a religious institution on the outskirts of West Bengal capital Kolkata, The Telegraph newspaper reported.
Seema Sai, 24, of Cha village located 185km north-west of Kolkata, was arrested on Thursday night for the crime.
She confessed to the crime and told the police that she was driven to take the extreme step because of regular "taunts" by her husband's family for giving birth to daughters and not a son.
The male child is traditionally preferred in Indian society and girls are seen as a burden as large dowries have to be paid for their weddings. A son is seen as essential also because the family lineage is propagated through male descendants.
Sai told the police she had travelled to Kolkata suburb Howrah with her daughters for her sister's wedding. She confessed during interrogation that she had initially intended to drown her daughters in the Hooghly River, which flows adjacent to the religious seminary, and then kill herself, the police said.
When she entered the seminary gardens, she saw the pond and threw her daughters in but did not have the courage to jump in herself, the police quoted her as saying.
"As the evening prayers were on at the math (seminary), no one saw her entering the garden," police official Niraj Kumar Singh said. She waited for a long while and left for home early next morning, he said.
After her arrest, Sai showed the police how and where she had drowned her daughters. "But we are verifying whether she gave the correct picture," a police official was quoted as saying.
Her father-in-law Ananda Sai and husband Kanchan have denied harassing Seema.
"We were very fond of the two girls. I used to play with them all the time. Its a blatant lie that we taunted and tortured her," the father-in-law said.
- Sapa-dpa
- SAPA
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