Woman in India murdered for refusing to marry cousin

A 25-year-old woman died on Friday after being brutally hit by an iron rod in India's capital, New Delhi. The woman, identified as Nargis, was killed by her own cousin after she refused to marry him.

The victim was on her way home when she was attacked by 28-year-old Irfan. According to local media reports, the accused had been planning the murder for three days.

"The woman's body was found under a bench with an injury to the head, and an iron rod was found lying nearby," PTI quoted deputy commissioner of police (south) Chandan Chowdhary as saying.

The police claimed that the two were in a relationship, but Nargis's family did not approve of it. Subsequently, the woman stopped speaking to Irfan.

The accused did not take it well and attacked Nargis while she was returning from her stenography class. He called out to her, stating that he wanted to speak to her, and hit her with the rod when she refused to speak to him.

Irfan later surrendered to the police and confessed to the crime. He has been arrested, and an investigation has been launched into the incident.

On the same day, another woman was shot dead near her house in Delhi. The perpetrator shot her in the head and later committed suicide. The victim and the accused had met at a gym nearly three years ago. The police are investigating what triggered the man to commit the heinous crime.

This is not the first time that such an incident has been reported in India. Crimes against women are not uncommon in India, which is a highly conservative society. Deaths due to dowry, female infanticide, rape, and sexual assault cases make it to the headlines of mainstream newspapers almost every day.

The country reports a crime against a woman every three minutes. The rate of crimes against women in Delhi alone is up by 11 percent. The area recorded 962 cases of violence against women in 2022, as opposed to the 833 cases reported in the same period in 2021.

Earlier this year, a 24-year-old man allegedly strangled his live-in partner to death before hiding her body in a refrigerator at a local dhaba (a roadside local food joint) in west Delhi, India.

The accused, identified as Sahil Gehlot, not only murdered his partner, Nikki Yadav, but also dismembered her body. He owns the dhaba located on the outskirts of Mitraon village in the Najafgarh area of the city.

Gehlot allegedly used his phone's data cord to strangle Yadav. He then went on to marry another woman the same day.

He told the police that he was being pressured by his family to marry some other woman and that his engagement and marriage were fixed for February 9 and 10, respectively. But he did not tell his live-in partner anything about this.

According to local media reports, Yadav got furious when she eventually learned about the engagement, and the two ended up having a heated argument over it.

They were about to leave for a trip to Himachal Pradesh when Gehlot strangled Yadav in a fit of rage in his car. He then dumped her body at the dhaba and solemnised his marriage to another woman hours later.

The horrific incident came days after a similar incident in which a woman was brutally murdered by her live-in partner in Delhi.

The accused in the case then chopped the victim's body into 35 pieces before scattering them all over the city. The man, identified as Aftab Amin Poonawalla, managed to keep his crime hidden for five months.

He would go out in the dead of night to dispose of the pieces at various locations in Delhi. He did it over a span of 18 days, with no one finding out what he was up to. The incident only came to light after Shraddha's family reached out to the police, as they had been unable to contact her for months.