india

Updated: Jul 28, 2019 15:26 IST

Police in Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district arrested a woman Sunday morning after she walked into a police station and confessed to have murdered her neighbour who allegedly tried to rape her and murder her six-year-old daughter.

The 30-year-old woman walked into Usthi police station, about 50 km South of Kolkata on Saturday evening and told the officers that she killed 25-year-old Tapan Shaw on Thursday night and buried the body in a garden near her house in a local village.

Police went to the place she described and dug out the body before arresting her Sunday..

“The woman confessed that she killed the youth. We have arrested her and recovered the murder weapon,” said Mithun Dey, sub-divisional police officer, Diamond Harbour. “The woman alleged that the youth wanted to rape her and kill her six-year-old daughter,” he added.

The woman’s husband is a daily wage labourer and stays away from home for weeks at a stretch.

Officers of Usthi police station said they were taken by surprise when the woman walked in and said that she had murdered someone. The officers did not believe her initially and thought she was mentally unstable. But she repeated the same statement without any incoherence.

She said Shaw had been harassing her for quite some time and entered her home in a drunken state on Thursday. She alleged that Shaw tried to throttle her daughter when she came to her rescue. She said she hit Shaw in the head with an iron rod to save her daughter and dragged the body to the garden later in the night.

Shaw’s family has claimed that the woman was making false allegations. “She could have had some enmity with my brother and is now making up a story about attempted rape,” said Dilip Shaw, elder brother of the deceased.