Two children, a 15-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother, were found charred to death inside their home in the Janipur area of Patna on Thursday afternoon.
Patna City SP (West) Bhanu Pratap Singh said family members of the siblings suggested foul play was involved and that the doors and windows of the house, in which the two were alone at the time of the incident, had been locked from the outside.
Lallan Kumar Gupta, a clerical staffer at the Election Commission, is the children’s father, and their mother is Shobha Devi, a nurse at AIIMS Patna.
According to Gupta, the children had returned from school and were home alone. “My wife was first informed at around 2.30 pm about the incident and rushed home. Upon reaching the house, she found the children’s charred bodies on the bed,” Gupta said.
“If the children were conscious, they would have tried to escape. Their bodies were lying on the bed,” he said, alleging that “something must have been done before burning their bodies”.
He also suspected that “more than one person was involved” in the incident.
SP Singh said, “At first glance, it appears that the children’s deaths were caused by the fire. In conversations with family members, they have said that the windows and doors were locked from the outside, so the possibility cannot be ruled out that someone from outside might have locked them. But we will examine all these points in our investigation to see what emerges. The post-mortem report, the FSL report, as well as any findings from the dog squad, will all be considered. Apart from this, nearby CCTV cameras will be checked, and if there are any eyewitnesses, they will be questioned as well. Only then will we get a complete picture of what happened and how.”
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Bihar Opposition Leader Tejashwi Yadav made a social media post about the incident, saying, “In Patna, criminals protected by those in power entered a home and burned alive a nurse’s two minor children. The criminals are so fearless that now nobody is safe at home, office, hospital, or anywhere else. The Chief Minister is clueless while the crooks are alert!”
