A 35-year-old man allegedly strangled his wife before hanging himself at their house in Vikaspuri here on Friday. The man left a suicide note in which he cast aspersions on his wife’s character, the police said.
On the other hand, relatives of the deceased woman, 29-year-old Yashpal Kaur, alleged that she had frequent arguments with her husband Shyam Kumar over what they described as “Shyam’s reluctance to work” and that he would often threaten to kill her.
Shyam, who drove a battery-operated rickshaw, had stopped working for the past few days triggering fresh arguments between the couple.
Yashpal’s elder sister Jasbeer Kaur said she made several calls on the mobile phones of her sister and her husband but neither of them answered the calls. Fearing that something was amiss, Jasbeer reached their one-room-house in the JG-II Block around 10 a.m.
“I kept knocking at the door but nobody answered. As the door was latched from inside, I peeped in through the window and was shocked to see my sister lying on the bed and her husband hanging from the ceiling fan. Their children were not inside,” said Jasbeer, who lives in the nearby H Block and frequently visited the couple’s house. Jasbeer then raised an alarm and the neighbours informed the police. The victims were taken to a nearby hospital where they were declared brought dead.
Jasbeer said Shyam had dropped off their two sons, aged 10 and 6, to his sister’s home in Shahapura.
Although the post-mortem will determine the exact timings of the deaths, the events leading to the deaths as described by the couple’s 10-year-old son Ishant indicated that the man could have hanged himself several hours after killing his wife.
“I was woken up by my mother’s screams around 4 a.m. and saw my father covering her mouth with his hand. He told me not to worry and that my mother was unwell. I went back to sleep and woke up at 7 a.m. when my father asked us to get ready to go to my aunt’s house. My mother was lying on the bed,” said Ishant.
Jasbeer said soon after their marriage in 2002, the couple moved to Ahmedabad where Shyam was running a business of manufacturing bearings. Both returned to Delhi with their sons five years later when Shyam’s business closed down. Shyam again failed with his bearing business here and had started plying the rickshaw a few months ago.
In 2011, Shyam went missing mysteriously and the family lodged a complaint but he could not be traced. The family, in the meantime, started living at Yashpal’s mother’s house. A few months later, he came back and told the family members that he had gone to Ahmedabad and avoided discussion on his absence.
The family also claimed that Yashpal was often beaten up by her husband but did not report it to the police fearing that it would jeopardise their already strained marital life.
