A woman in Delhi allegedly killed her husband, who forced her to go through a series of abortions and even forced her to sleep with her own brother — all in the hope of getting a male heir to take forward his family business. The murder took place in at Jaitpur in southeast Delhi.

The shocking incident came to light after the woman called up the police to claim her husband had been murdered. She said her husband had invited two guests for a party the night before, so she had retired to bed in another room. When she woke up in the morning, she found her husband's dead body and the guests missing.

The police, however, found a suspicious man limping away with the victim's clothes after inspecting CCTV footage from the building. On closer inspection, the man turned out to be the woman's brother. Under the interrogation that followed, the woman broke down and narrated a horrific story.

According to the woman, who has been booked for murder along with her brother, her husband would torture her for not being able to bear a male child. During their 18-year-marriage, he forced her to undergo a series of abortions, when she discovered the foetus was female. One of the girls she gave birth to in 2010 died after four years due to malnutrition.

In his desperation for a male heir, he forced his wife to have sex with her brother under his supervision. If she refused to comply, he would threaten her with gangrape or being sold into the sex trade. The woman's brother not only worked for her husband but had also taken a loan from him. "He threatened to fire her brother from the job if he did not repay the loan or get intimate with her and give him a son," a police officer said.

The siblings killed him by drugging him, then strangling him with her dupatta, to escape their predicament.

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