A 40-year-old man allegedly tricked his teenage daughter into writing suicide notes to implicate his relatives and then asked her to enact suicide during which he actually killed her, police said.
The 16-year-old girl was found hanging from the ceiling fan of her house in Kalamna area of Nagpur city on November 6, a police official on Saturday said.
The man, who worked as a labourer, was later arrested and an investigation was on to ascertain the motive behind the murder, he said.
Police initially registered a case of abetment to suicide against the girl's stepmother, uncle, aunt and grandparents on the basis of five suicide notes found in the room, the official of Kalamna police station said.
But an examination of the mobile phone of the victim's father during the probe revealed there was a fiendish plot behind what looked like a suicide.
"In the mobile phone, we found a photograph of the victim enacting a suicide bid. It came to light that he had asked his daughter to act as if she was hanging herself and clicked a photograph, claiming he wanted to teach his relatives a lesson," the police official said.
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"Before that the man had asked the girl to write five suicide notes naming these relatives. When the girl did so and tied the noose around her neck and stood on a stool as instructed by him, he clicked a photo and then allegedly kicked the stool, causing her death by hanging. She died in front of her father and 12-year-old sister," the official said.
The accused then left the house. He later called police, claiming he had stepped out for some work and upon return found his daughter had hanged herself, said the official.
The police initially registered a case of suicide abetment under the Indian Penal Code against the five relatives. But the investigators later realised something was amiss.
"After we came across the suicide enactment photo in his phone, we questioned the man and he told the police that he murdered his daughter. His first wife ended her life in 2016 and the second wife had also left home," the official said.
The man was arrested for the alleged murder. The police were conducting a probe into the motive behind the crime, the official added.