Boys aged 6 & 7 beaten to death for plucking mangoes in Chattisgarh

|HT|

Two young boys, aged 6 and 7, were mercilessly beaten with sticks by four minors in a Chhattisgarh village on Sunday because the two plucked mangoes from a tree owned by the family of one of the accused, police said on Thursday. Police said when the four boys, aged between 11 and 14 years, figured that one of them had died, they killed the other boy also to cover up their crime. But another child, a scared nine-year-old, had seen the assault from a distance and eventually told a special team of the police investigating the twin murder. The two bodies were found on Tuesday in an agricultural field in Baloda Bazar district.

During investigations, police found that the two victims were last spotted with some other children near a mango orchard. However, the identity of the other group of children was not known.

“We constituted three teams to investigate the murders. One of the teams went to a nearby brick kiln where a worker said that a nine-year-old boy had come running on Sunday and asked for water,” said Baloda Bazar superintendent of police (SP) Deepak Jha.

Jha said the child was located but he wouldn’t just talk to the police. Officers then reached out to a child welfare officer for help. The child welfare officer told the boy that he could get a mobile phone if he tells the police what he knows about the crime.

Jha said the boy told police that he saw the victims being chased by some boys armed with bamboo sticks. “We got names of the children who were running after the victim and they were detained from a local school,” the SP said.

Jha said the accused objected to the two children plucking mangoes from their orchard. When the two young children tried to run away, the four chased them and hit them with bamboo sticks. “One kid died on the spot and the other was unconscious. The accused hit him with bamboo sticks several times since he had witnessed the other child’s murder,” said Jha, who oversaw the investigation. Police said they have seized the two sticks used in the crime from the possession of the juveniles. On Thursday, they were sent to a juvenile home.

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