Man Sets House Ablaze And Kills Woman After Her Sister-In-Law Resists Rape

A woman in India died while her daughter and sister-in-law suffered serious burn injuries as a man, with an intention to rape one of the women, set their house ablaze after failing in his plan, reports said.

The horrific incident happened in a village in the eastern Indian state of Bihar on Monday night. The suspect set the house on fire while the victims were asleep.

The suspect, identified as Nand Kumar Kushwaha, entered the house of now deceased Suman Devi, 23, to rape her sister-in-law Aarti Devi, 29, on Sunday night, police were quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.

Aarti defended herself and resisted Kushwaha's attempt to rape her. She managed to push the perpetrator out of the house. Enraged by his failed attempt, Kushwaha went back home and came with petrol Monday night. He then sprinkled the fuel around the house and set it on fire, police said, reported Times Now News.

After noticing smoke from the burning house, neighbors rushed to the scene and took the victims out of the residence. All three victims were rushed to a nearby hospital. However, Suman died during treatment while her 7-year-old daughter Radhika Kumari's condition is critical, the outlet reported.

"Preliminary probe suggests Aarti was the main target but she survived as she was sleeping in another room," a senior investigating officer Himanshu Shankar Trivedi told Hindustan Times.

Meanwhile, the victims' relatives claimed that the police did not register a complaint initially when they approached them. However, investigators have now arrested Kushwaha and two other suspects identified by Aarti in connection with the incident.

In a similar incident last month, a man from Yelehanka, near Bengaluru, a city in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, was hacked to death by a group of men to exact revenge on his wife, who thrashed them for allegedly molesting her.

The victim, identified as Chandrashekar, was murdered for a previous enmity with his wife Shweta, who had reportedly filed an earlier complaint against the suspects for harassing her. When the cops called Shweta to resolve the issue, she was asked to thrash the men in front of the officials and the incident reportedly instigated them to exact revenge.