Uttar Pradesh police, who had on Tuesday described the mysterious hanging of two Dalit girls in Farrukhabad as a double suicide, on Friday registered a case and arrested two young men on the charge of abetment of suicide.

The girls’ parents continued to insist that the teens had been murdered after sexual assault.

The girls, aged 16 and 18, were found hanging from a mango tree at the end of their dupattas in village Bhagautipur on Tuesday morning. They had gone to a nearby temple the previous night to participate in a Krishna Janmashtami event and never returned home.

Since the girls’ feet were more than six feet above the ground, their parents had claimed murder, either by hanging or before hanging.

But the police called it a “suicide pact” while suggesting off the record that if at all it were a double murder, the killers were the girls’ families.

The police have not shared the post-mortem reports with the media but eventually filed a case against two young men.

“The case was registered on the basis of mobile phone calls and the statements of
the girls’ parents,” a police officer said.

However, the father of the elder victim said: “I have been saying from the first day that it’s a case of sexual assault followed by murder. We had told the police that these two young men, from the adjoining Kampil area, were in touch with our daughters and had been harassing them. We don’t know how the police concluded that it was merely abetment of suicide.”

He added: “We still say that it’s a clear case of murder. We have known from the beginning that our daughters were killed by these two but the policemen were questioning us as (suspected) murderers. This terrorised us.”

The girls’ parents are friends and so were their daughters.

Shiv Dayal and Seku Lal, fathers of the arrested Deepak and Pawan, respectively, said their sons were innocent.

“The girls were close to our sons but they (youths) had not gone to the orchard on Monday night. But the police are not ready to listen to us. The girls used to call my son; he didn’t call them,” Shiv Dayal claimed.

Farrukhabad superintendent of police Alok Priyadarshi said: “A SIM recovered from one of the victims had been purchased in the name of Deepak. The investigation is still on. There were no injury marks on the girls’ bodies.”