Ratan Singh is survived by his mother Ramkali, his wife Manju and three sons, two of whom are still unmarried. He was employed as a gardener in the New Delhi municipal corporation.

When this correspondent visited the family this week, the women were in no condition to talk.

Pinki, wife of Ratan Singh's elder son Arun, said the death has left the family shattered, who are now looking at an uncertain future."We were very stressed after the theft. No one in the house was talking much. Babuji had hardly slept all this while as he had been spending the nights in the shed,” she said. “And then this happened. The tragedy has hit us really hard.”

The family blames the police for their loss.

Arun said the village has witnessed a spate of cattle thefts over the past two months but the police did not take the matter seriously.

Villagers say that even a day prior to the killing, they spotted three thieves and alerted the police. The police, they say, ignored their pleas of patrolling the area at night.

Pooja, Ratan Singh's niece, told Swarajya that on Saturday morning, she called up the Jarcha police station to inform them about the thieves seen on Friday night, but the police called her a liar. "The cop on the other side asked me to stop lying and disconnected phone," she said, and showed her call records.

When asked, Prabhash Chand said that the police act when there is a formal complaint. "The villagers are talking about four-five incidents in a month, but they didn’t approach us with a formal complaint. We received only one or two cases and we are investigating those," he said.

Vijay Singh, on the other hand, told Swarajya that after his buffalo was stolen on April 3, he went to the police station but the police refused to register an FIR.

On the headway in the murder case, Prabhash Chand said the dead thief has been identified as one Jaiprakash from Ghaziabad's Loni area and hunt for his accomplices is on.

Singh said that while he understood the anger of the family, it is near impossible for the police to patrol all the villages given the "limited manpower".

Distraught villagers, naturally, aren’t buying the excuse. The death has left them furious and unnerved. They say they don't remember a cattle thief going to this extreme in the past. They say they are now in a fix; with police giving excuses, they do not know what to do when the thieves strike next.

Babu Singh, 70, is a neighbour of Ratan Singh. On April 17, thieves entered his cow shed and took away his buffalo.