'Blind' murders of two girls force UP cops to look beyond borders

MEERUT: Scores of policemen have fanned out in UP ’s Shamli, Baghpat and Muzaffarnagar and in Panipat and Karnal districts of Haryana just to get a clue about the identity of two murdered girls. It has been ten days since the two girls were found dead in a sugarcane field in Jaganpura village of Shamli. In spite of several efforts, local police failed to establish their identity.

In hope of making headway, police have distributed thousands of pamphlets in the region with the photographs of the girls on it.

Sending shockwaves in the region, the battered bodies of the two girls, most likely in their early 20s, were recovered from a sugarcane field on the Shamli village’s outskirts on May 20. Tied to each other with a rope, the bodies were covered in blood. The girls had sustained repeated blows on their heads with blunt objects, the postmortem report revealed.

Ten days on, police are yet to ascertain the identity of the deceased.

Shamli superintendent of police (SP) Vineet Jaiswal said, “Thousands of pamphlets with pictures and details of the deceased girls have been distributed in the neighbouring villages. Police also conducted a door-to-door survey to reach out to locals for any lead.”

The SP added, “Police teams, with the pamphlets, are going to every household in neighbouring villages of the area where the bodies were found. So far, we haven’t got any breakthrough.”

The pamphlets have also been put up at several prominent locations, including bus stations, markets and crossings in the district. A reward of Rs 25,000 has also been announced for any clues leading to the identification of the murdered girls.

Teams have also been sent to police stations of neighbouring districts of Baghpat, Muzaffarnagar, Panipat and Karnal to match the details of the girls with missing persons’ record.

“The field, where the body was abandoned, is surrounded by 4-5 villages and is connected by a kuchcha road. We are in constant touch with pradhans of these villages apart from reaching out to their counterparts in other neighbouring districts, including those in Haryana,” the SP said. Circumstantial and forensic evidence also did not yield much. According to police, the murder took somewhere else and the bodies were later abandoned in the field. “When we reached the spot, the bodies were tied to each other and a blanket and towel were lying nearby. There were tyre marks of a two-wheeler at the spot as well,” a policeman privy to the investigation said.

Deserted stretches of western UP and its canals have long been used as “dumping ground” for bodies by criminals to fox investigators. In May last year, the headless body of a 23-year-old woman, with her fingers missing and torso bearing several brutal injury marks, was found in a cane field in Bulandshahr. Police are yet to solve the case. A few months later, the body of a 25-year-old woman was found dumped in a sack in Bulandshahr’s Gulaothi area.