Hyderabad: Another SC Woman Killed By Muslim Boyfriend; Butcher’s Knife Used For Slitting Throat

This correspondent has been extensively reporting on cases of Hindu women being killed by their Muslim boyfriends. It has been our aim to make these crimes acknowledged as a distinct category among gender atrocities as similar cases when religions are reversed – that is, where men are Hindu and women are Muslim – are almost negligible in comparison.

In a fresh case that has emerged from Hyderabad, a woman belonging to a Scheduled Caste, was killed by her boyfriend Syed Mustafa and his brother Jameel on the intervening night of 17 and 18 October.

Jameel is a butcher by profession and used a butcher’s knife kept at home to commit the brutal crime, the police told Swarajya.

The woman, 23-year-old K Radhika, was a second-year student of Bachelors of Law degree from the Mahatma Gandhi Law College.

As per the statement by her brother Pawan Kumar recorded in the FIR (number 214/2020 registered at Rein Bazar police station of Hyderabad), Radhika left the house on 17 October around 2:30 pm, saying that she needed to go for her dog-training course as well as for meeting Syed Mustafa “to discuss her love matter”. She also took Rs 500 from Pawan before leaving. The statement says that Radhika had been seeing Syed for the past five months.

P Anjaneyulu, station house officer (SHO) of the Rein Bazar police station, told this correspondent over the phone that the police found the woman’s body at Mustafa’s house around 6 am on 18 October. “We got the information from a local informer that two brothers had committed a murder and ran away from the house. We carried out a raid and found the body,” he said.

The officer said that CCTV footage of the area shows a burqa-clad woman, identified as Radhika, entering Mustafa’s house around 12 in the night on 17 October.

Radhika was a resident of Dathatreyanagar in Asifnagar area of Hyderabad, which is around 10 kilometres from Mustafa’s house in Yakutpura in Muslim-populated old Hyderabad.

“Some altercation happened between the two sides, after which Mustafa and his brother attacked the woman with a butcher’s knife. Mustafa’s brother works part-time as a butcher and the weapon was lying at home,” the officer said.

“Her throat had been sliced from the front,” he said.

He further said that investigation has revealed that the brothers had lost their mother to cancer on 1 October. After the tragedy, Mustafa had stopped taking Radhika’s calls and was avoiding meeting her.

Radhika’s brother Pawan told this correspondent that he has little information about what was happening between Radhika and Mustafa, and he does not know whether Radhika knew about the death. “The only time I met Mustafa was about two months ago when he came to drop my sister. Out of courtesy, we invited him inside the home. He had tea and left. That’s all I know,” he said.

Radhika was a volunteer at an animal welfare organisation and it was while working here that she met Mustafa, who was also a volunteer, said Pawan.

Sharing more details about the victim and the perpetrator, the officer, Anjaneyulu, said that he has learnt that Mustafa and his brother had, about six months ago, “converted from Sunni to Shia” – a decision they took independent of their parents.

The officer also said that Radhika’s mother is a Muslim by birth while her father, Raj Kumar, is a Hindu by birth. He further said that though the family said they were practising Christians, he added the SC/ST Atrocity Act in the FIR as they still had certificates showing them to be from a Scheduled Caste.

Besides the Atrocity Act and IPC section 302 (murder), the police have also added IPC sections 417 and 420 for cheating. When asked, Anjaneyulu said it was because the complaint said that the accused, Mustafa, had falsely promised the woman that he would marry her.