Woman, paramour arrested in Tamil Nadu's Vellore district for murdering infant daughter
VELLORE: A day after police recovered the decomposed body of an infant girl at the foothills of Mottamalai Murugar temple near Kammavanpettai, the police arrested two persons including the victim's mother here on Monday.
P Manjula (23) and her partner M Rajamani (23), both from Kammavanpettai, were arrested. Police said that the accused saw the child as a hindrance to their marriage and murdered it.
The baby was born to Manjula and her second husband, Pandiarajan, in May this year. She had ran off with him shortly after she tied knots with her first husband Panchacharam, who is her maternal uncle. "Due to the age difference, Manjula dumped her first husband," a police officer said.
She knew Pandiarajan through one of her relatives and both of them developed a relationship and got married. However, they lived together for a couple of months in Pandiarajan's native place Theni and gave birth to the girl child. After some misunderstanding, Pandiarajan left Manjula and fled to Chennai in search of work, the police officer told Express.
Meanwhile, the relationship developed between Manjula and Rajamani. She knew Rajamani as the man frequented the shoe company she was working in at Arcot. Rajamani did not wish to accept Manjula's infant daughter into his family. Therefore, they decided to kill the girl.
Police sources said that on December 23, they went to the foothills of the Murugar temple and strangled the infant girl to death and hit her head with a stone. Six days after the murder, the body was found by the locals.
A doctor from the Government Vellore Medical College Hospital (GVMCH), Adukkambarai performed the postmortem. Following the investigation with the locals in Kammavanpettai, a police team, led by Inspector Ramachandran of Vellore, zeroed in both the suspects, and arrested them.