NEW DELHI: Parents of the 17-year-old girl who was raped and strangled are yet to come to terms with the fact that the youth they had sheltered for so long turned out to be their tormentor. Rajkumar (22) was arrested for not just raping their daughter but also murdering their relative's eight-year-old son who had come to stay with them during Diwali.

The girl has been battling for her life at Lady Irwin hospital. When she had tried to resist the rape attempt, Rajkumar repeatedly hit her on the head with an iron rod. He killed the girl's cousin with the same rod when the boy tried to stop the rape after hearing her cries for help.“She wanted to be an independent woman and support her mother,“ said the child's father.

The family had shifted to the two-room basement apart ment in Khadda Colony in northwest Delhi's Swaroop Nagar area three months ago from another house in the locality where they have been staying for the past four years.Rajkumar was the family's neighbour even then. The girl's mother treated him like a son as he claimed to have lost his parents when he was a child. But two years later he started demanding that the couple marry their daughter to him.

“He threatened to ruin the girl's future if they refused to get him married to her. Once, during an ar gument, the girl had slapped him in the presence of her pa rents after he touched her inappro priately. This had upset him,“ said the girl's aunt, adding that he had vowed to avenge this humiliation.

A month later, the family shifted to the basement apartment in J Block in November. Rajkumar too rented a room opposite them and worked at a nearby eatery . On November 11, the girl's grandfather, who stayed in another block, died out of a heart attack after which the family shifted to that house.

However, the girl, who had taken up the job in a garment shop nearby, stayed back with her cousin and Rajkumar promised to take care of them. He attacked her on the day she got up early to prepare breakfast.

Rajkumar claimed that he committed the crime in a fit of rage as he presumed that she might get married elsewhere. DCP (northwest) Vijay Singh said that he was taken to the scene of the incident to recreate the scene to verify the versions.