A Dalit teen has been gang-raped and murdered in Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki with her family accusing police of forcing them to cremate the body and delaying the registration of a case under the relevant sections, in what appeared to be a rerun of the Hathras incident.

The father of the 18-year-old Barabanki girl said her body, with no clothes on, was found with multiple injury marks in an agricultural field on Wednesday, her hands and feet tied. He alleged the police forced him to cremate the body and threatened to book him for murder if he insisted on adding the gang-rape charge.

R.S. Gautam, the police chief, said: “We had registered a murder case against two suspects and arrested them. The gang-rape case was added after we got the autopsy report.”