A 19-year-old man has been arrested on Tuesday night for allegedly killing his sister-in-law and portraying it as a suicide after she asked him to stop playing games on his phone and look for a job.
The police said that Irshad Alam forced rat poison down the victim’s throat after allegedly strangulating her to death to stage the scene on Saturday. When he called up the police to inform them about the death, he told them that his sister-in-law Sahiba (25) had consumed rat poison.
Initially, the police had registered a case of accidental death and sent Sahiba’s body for autopsy. The autopsy report, which came on Tuesday, revealed that there were no traces of rat poison in her stomach. Meanwhile, doctors found ligature marks on her neck and realised that the cause of death was strangulation.
When the officers questioned Alam again, he confessed to the crime and was arrested and charged for murder under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code.
Alam revealed to the police that the deceased had been married to his elder brother Zuber and had three children and they all stayed together in a single-storey house at Malwani.
“Alam said that the deceased used to constantly bicker and fight with him whenever she saw him on his phone playing games. She wanted Alam to contribute towards the family expenditure or move out,” said a police officer from Malwani police station.
On Friday, the deceased started quarrelling with him. Alam the hatched a plan to murder her and on Saturday, when the deceased was alone in the house, Alam sneaked behind her while she was in the kitchen and strangled her with a cloth. After she died, Alam took out the rat kill bottle from his pocket and poured it in her mouth.
His elder brother, Zuber, a daily wage labourer, told police that he had gone for work when he received Alam’s call, informing him that his wife had died by suicide.