A 21-year-old woman killed her two-and-a-half-year-old niece on Monday morning by throwing the child inside a water tank and shutting down its lid in the Indian state of Rajasthan, local police said.
As reported by the Times of India, the woman, identified as Maya Pareek, was infuriated with the child's father, her brother, for stopping her from meeting her boyfriend and killed the toddler in revenge.
After the child died, she put the body in a plastic bag and hid it inside a haystack. The police recovered the body from Pareek's residence in the evening and registered a murder case against her. Local law enforcement officer Dilip Singh confirmed Pareek was taken into custody and remanded in police custody for three days.
The crime was captured on a CCTV camera. Following a postmortem examination, the child's body was returned to the family. The investigation is still ongoing.
In a similar incident that took place last week, a woman killed two of her nephews, aged 4 and 5 years, in the rural parts of Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, following an argument with her sister-in-law - the mother of the children, according to The Statesman. Police said the woman was mentally ill and beat the children on the head with a wooden plank, critically injuring them. The children later succumbed to their injuries.
Last year, a 34-year-old woman from Kozhikode, Kerala, was arrested for killing her 12-year-old nephew by lacing his ice cream with rat poison over a family rivalry between her family and the family of the victim.
