Girls Found Hanged in Mango Tree

 
Two girls found hanged in a mango tree this year in rural India, their deaths captured in heartbreaking photos that swept the world, weren’t raped and murdered, a government probe has concluded—but killed themselves in a suicide pact.

The May deaths, and a relative’s allegations that the pair had been dragged away in the dark by a group of men when they went to a field to relieve themselves, reignited national anger about persistent violence against women in India.
On Thursday, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation said its probe found that the girls, 12 and 14 years old, hanged themselves because they “possibly” feared their family disapproved of their friendship with a young man in the village who belonged to a different caste.
The father of one of the dead girls, who were cousins, disputed the CBI’s findings. “It’s not a suicide. They were raped and murdered. We are not telling lies,” he said in an interview on Thursday.
The case resonated widely because it seemed to encapsulate many of the obstacles women face in rural India—including a widespread lack of toilets, which forces people to wait until the relative privacy of dusk to relieve themselves outdoors. In rural areas, women say, this exposes them to routine harassment.
A CBI examination of “40 scientific reports…and more than 200 persons” led it to conclude that “it was a case of suicide by the two girls,” said Kanchan Prasad, the federal police agency’s spokeswoman.
The CBI said the older girl was in a relationship with a 19-year-old man—who police later arrested, along with his two brothers, on suspicion of raping her. On the night before the girls’ bodies were found, the pair had gone to meet the man, the agency said.
The older girl and the man “were going to indulge in a consensual intimate act but before they could proceed further,” one of the girl’s relatives showed up and disrupted the encounter, the CBI said. The girls ran away.
On Thursday, the CBI said “allegations of sexual assault and murder of the minor girls” against the arrested men “were false.” The CBI said that the relative who claimed to have seen the girls dragged away confessed to fabricating the incident.
The case of rape and murder against the three men is still pending in a local court, but the CBI said Thursday it is going to file its final report soon before the court saying “wrong persons were arrested.”
In interviews at the time of the deaths, an uncle said he had seen the girls being taken away against their will. “I saw three men dragging” them, he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview in the village of Katara Sadatganj, where the cousins were next-door neighbors.
In the interview, the uncle said he tried to restrain a fourth man, whom he recognized, but the man pulled a gun on him. “I got scared and ran away,” the uncle said. He couldn’t be reached for comment on Thursday.