A 45-year-old woman was brutally tortured and killed in Bihar’s Khagaria district.

Police asserted that the murder was a fallout of a land dispute going on since 2020 and arrested three persons in connection with the crime.

The victim’s husband Babul Singh and brother-in-law Kare Singh were shot dead in 2014 for the same dispute. The people allegedly involved in killing them had come out on bail last year.

The latest incident occurred at Mahaddipur village under Pasraha police station in the district, around 200km east of Patna on Saturday evening.

The victim has been identified as Sulekha Devi.

According to Sulekha’s family and villagers, she was transplanting paddy at her farm when a group of people arrived on motorcycles and attacked her. They escaped after killing her.

“An FIR has been registered and 13 persons are accused in it. Three of them have been arrested. We are making efforts to nab others,” Gogri sub-divisional police officer (SDPO) Manoj Kumar, under whose jurisdiction the incident occurred, told The Telegraph.

According to villagers, Sulekha’s eyes were gouged out, her tongue was sliced, and her private parts were mutilated before she was stabbed to death.

Although Manoj denied that the victim’s private parts were mutilated or injured, he did accept that her eyes were damaged with the help of a sharp-edged weapon.

“She had five or six stabs and cut wounds on her body. The inquest and the post-mortem have been done. We are yet to receive the post-mortem report,” the SDPO said.

“Sulekha’s family had purchased five bighas of land in 2000. Around the same time, another family in the village had also bought the same piece of land. Both families have been fighting over it since then. She had lost her husband and brother in the feud in 2014,” the SDPO added.