‘Mentally disturbed’ man axes nine to death

AFP/Raipur

A villager yesterday axed to death four women and five young girls while apparently mentally disturbed after his wife left him, police said.

Pandu Nagesia, 35, killed nine of his neighbours during his rampage through Behratoli village in the central state of Chhattisgarh, district police chief Govardhan Singh Darroh said.

The victims were five girls aged between two and nine, a 25-year-old and three women over 60, he said.

“A total of nine females were axed to death,” Darroh said. “The accused Nagesia first attacked a 25-year-old woman and her two-year-old child and axed them to death, subsequently killing his neighbours one after another,” the police chief said.

“The accused seems to be mentally disturbed after his wife deserted him,” he added, after Nagesia was taken into custody and the axe recovered from the village, 625kms north of the state capital Raipur.

An eyewitness said the incident happened in the early afternoon when some women and children had assembled at a house after their male relatives had gone to work in a nearby mine, the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency reported.

Another police officer investigating the case, said the accused had locked himself in a room after killing the women and refused to open the room when the police reached the village. Villager elders have told the police that Nagesia rarely ventured out of his home and never allowed his neighbours to enter the house.

Local officials have announced a compensation of Rs25,000 each for the families of the deceased, PTI said.

Attacks on Indian women have been in the global spotlight since December, when a 23-year-old student was brutally attacked and raped by six men on a moving bus in the capital New Delhi.

She died two weeks later of her injuries.

The case prompted outrage at home and abroad, prompting parliament to toughen laws to make the country safer for women. Since the Delhi case, a string of other attacks have hit the headlines, including the gang-rape of a Swiss cyclist in Madhya Pradesh last month.

On Wednesday four sisters walking home in Uttar Pradesh suffered severe burns after being attacked with acid by two men on a motorbike—a brutal example of another growing problem in south Asia.