The mother of Ankita Bhandari, the woman who was murdered near Rishikesh in Uttarakhand last week has claimed that her daughter was hastily cremated and that she could not see the body, NDTV reported.
The mother, Soni Devi, added that she had been admitted to a hospital where she was taken on the false pretext of seeing her daughter. She claimed that she was forcibly put on an intravenous sugar solution even though she was not unwell at all. “They tricked me into coming here,” she alleged, according to Mirror Now. “I was sitting at the civic body’s office. This is just for show, they have betrayed us.”
On September 23, Pulkit Arya, the son of former Uttarakhand minister Vinod Arya, and two of his associates had confessed to killing Bhandari. The next day, officials recovered the body from the Chilla Canal in Rishikesh, where the three men admitted to have flung it after the murder.
Bhnadari worked as a receptionist at a resort owned by Pulkit Arya.
On Monday, Bhandari’s family and locals submitted a memorandum to Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami through Congress leader Harish Rawat, India Today reported. They demanded death penalty for the three men accused in the case – Pulkit Arya, resort manager Saurabh Bhaskar and assistant manager Ankit Gupta.
They also sought a compensation of Rs 1 crore to Bhandari’s family.
The three accused men have been sent to judicial custody for 14 days. They have been booked under Section 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) and Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code.
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