Multiple marriages, five children crammed in a single room, a mysterious 2018 death, and financial ruin - the triple suicide of three sisters in Ghaziabad reeks of buried horrors.
Pakhi, 12, Prachi, 14, and Nishika, 16, had jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor of their flat in Bharat City, a residential township in Ghaziabad, last Wednesday, allegedly after their parents objected to their gaming addiction and took away their phones.
While the initial narrative centered on a "gaming addiction," the investigation into their father, Chetan Kumar, has exposed a crumbling timeline of serial weddings and suspicious inconsistencies.
Police sources reveal that Kumar's testimony regarding his marriages fails the test of basic logic. He claimed his second marriage was a necessity born of his first wife's inability to conceive, yet the ages of his children suggest otherwise.
"Kumar (the girls' father) has been changing statements. He tried to hide his marriage to Tina initially," a senior police officer said.
Post-mortem reports confirm the minors died from head injuries. Atul Kumar Singh, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Shalimar Garden, told NDTV that there were no signs of sexual assault on the girls.
The phones of the minors, one of which was sold off just 15 days before the incident, have been traced and sent, along with others, for forensic analysis to determine what transpired in the final hours.
Consent, Cover-Up And Serial Marriages
Chetan Kumar, his three wives - Sujata, Hina, and Tina - and their five children slept in one room of a three-bedroom flat in Ghaziabad's Bharat City Society. Probe shows he fathered a daughter and a mentally challenged son with first wife Sujata.
"He said that he married Hina because Sujata couldn't conceive", ACP Singh said. As per Kumar's testimony to police, he married Sujata in 2010, her sister Hina in 2013 and Tina, who had converted to Hinduism from Islam, in 2023. However, Kumar's timeline and reasons for marrying Hina don't add up as Sujata's daughter at the time of her death is believed to be 16.
Asked how he managed to marry three women without divorcing any of the previous wives, the ACP said, "The women had apparently consented to the marriages. No one complained."
With Hina, he had two daughters (14 and 12), both died by 'suicide' along with Sujata's elder daughter, allegedly jumping off from the ninth floor of the building. Tina, the youngest of the wives, 22, has a three-year-old daughter with him. "She had worked with Kumar in the past. So far it has emerged that the other wives consented to this marriage too," the ACP said.
As per the police, so far, Kumar, during interrogation, has maintained that his daughters were addicted to task-based Korean games and that he had taken away their phones.
Police have also recovered a 30-page diary where the girls had reportedly mentioned that they were frustrated after their access to Korean drama and K-Pop music was cut off.
Another detail that has emerged is the death of Sujata and Hina's sister in 2018, who had fallen off the balcony of the house while visiting them. The case was treated as an accidental death, and the family never filed any police complaint.
Kumar, who works as a stockbroker, carries a debt burden of Rs 2 crore, police said. Apart from selling his daughters' mobile phones to pay the power bill, he did not send the girls to school even after the Covid-19 pandemic subsided, police said. The reason for this, the police said, was the huge debt burden.
