Uttar Pradesh: Woman dies 11 days after five men allegedly set her on fire in Shahjahanpur
Police said an FIR has been filed against the accused, but no arrests have been made so far.
A woman who was set on fire on November 23 after she allegedly resisted harassment by five men in Uttar Pradesh’s Shahjahanpur district died on Tuesday, PTI reported. The 35-year-old succumbed to burn injuries at a hospital in Bareilly.
The woman was identified as Koyal Giri of Juna Akhara who had contested the state Assembly election in 2010 on a Peace Party ticket, ANI reported. Unidentified police officials said that she had given a statement to a magistrate in which she mentioned the names of the men who had attacked her. The body was sent for a postmortem examination.
Bareilly Range Inspector General P Prakash said that a First Information Report has been filed against the five men. “The victim’s statement, some videos and eyewitnesses statements are being taken into account,” he said. “No arrests have been made so far.”
The accused – Pankaj Gupta, Sushil Babu Gupta, Anurag Gupta, Anil Gupta and their aide Daulat Giri – are businessmen who own petrol pumps and rice mills. The police have registered a case against the accused under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code.
The incident took place in Bahadurganj village in Tilhar when the woman was returning home, according to the complaint filed by her mother the next day. The complaint mentioned that the accused had been harassing the victim for the past two months over a land dispute, the Hindustan Times reported.
“The woman said she was harassed by them when she was returning home,” the police said in a statement. “She also said in the statement to the magistrate that they had allegedly poured kerosene on her and then set her afire.”
Giri’s nephew accused the police of trying to shield the accused by claiming that she had set herself on fire in her house.
In a similar incident, a 20-year-old woman in the state’s Sitapur district was set ablaze for allegedly resisting sexual advances. The police on Sunday arrested one of the accused in the case.