SRINAGAR: Police have arrested a man for allegedly suffocating her nine-year-old daughter to death and then slitting her throat in Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara district, officials said on Monday.
"Mohammad Iqbal Khatana was arrested last week for the March 29 killing of his minor daughter," a senior police officer told reporters in Kupwara, about 100 kilometres from here.
Narrating the sequence of events, he said Khatana's relations with his wife, Nageena Begum, were strained for the last one year and they would often quarrel.
"On the day of the crime, Khatana, a taxi driver by profession, had a heated argument with his wife in the morning. After returning from work in the evening, he took a kitchen knife with the intention of taking his own life," the officer said.
While Khatana was leaving the house on the pretext of getting a punctured tyre fixed, his daughter Uzma asked him for Rs 5. "Khatana gave her a Rs 10 currency note. His wife followed him up to the courtyard. However, Uzma followed her father up to the main road," the officer said.
"Khatana took Uzma in his vehicle and drove around for more than an hour, waiting for the roads to get deserted so that he can kill himself."
As people left for Taraweeh, he drove his vehicle to Her-Khurhama, near a transformer, where he halted the vehicle. There, out of mental anguish due to domestic issues with his wife, he suffocated Uzma for around two to three minutes, as a result of which the girl died on the spot," the officer said.
The accused then drove to his house and carried his daughter's body to a spot next to the firewood shed of his uncle's house.
"He placed the body in the shed in the supine position (chest facing upwards) and then, slit her throat with the knife, so that the blame falls on the occupants of the adjacent houses," the officer said.
The accused then returned home, where the other family members raised a hue and cry when they saw Uzma was not with him.
Subsequently, the accused, along with a few others, went to the Khurhama police post in his vehicle to get a missing report lodged for Uzma.