In a suspected case of honour killing, a Muslim woman was strangulated and mutilated by her father and brother in Purba Burdwan district, West Bengal, for being in a ‘relationship’ with a Hindu man.

The duo, residents of Bihar’s Jamalpur, were arrested from Kolkata on Monday by Purba Burdwan district police, a senior officer said.

Police who on 31st August recovered the body of a woman whose face was mutilated with a stone, from an agricultural land around 19 km from Burdwan, said “During the post-mortem, we found two numbers jotted on her body, following which we got hold of the man with whom she was in a relationship.”

A police team then reached the Hindu man’s residence in Mumbai, who then provided the police with all the necessary details of the woman’s residence and family members. This helped the police to nab her father and brother, who worked as drivers in Kolkata.

The two admitted to killing the woman with a rope inside a moving vehicle, while they were taking her back to Jamalpur and then dumped her body in the agricultural land after defacing her face with a stone, the officer said.

Though this is a suspected case of honour killing, the police are also probing whether there were other reasons behind her killing.

This is not for the first time where a Muslim girl or woman has been penalised with death by her family members for choosing a Hindu as her life partner. In June last year, a pregnant Muslim woman was burnt alive by her family in Karnataka for marrying a Hindu man, while a Hindu man and his Muslim wife were killed in broad daylight by woman’s brother in Uttar Pradesh in November 2014.

There have been several instances also where the man has been castigated for being in a relationship with a Muslim girl or woman like the one we reported late last year where four members of a Muslim family, including a woman, had been accused of killing a member of their own family – a teenage girl – because she fell in love with a Hindu boy, who was also killed by them. Similarly, in September last year, a Hindu man was killed in Andhra Pradesh for being in a relationship with a Muslim girl. In March 2015, a Hindu man in Bihar was also killed as he ‘dared’ to marry a Muslim girl.

In another such incident, in February this year, a Hindu boy named Ankit Saxena was brutally murdered in Delhi for being in a relationship with a girl named Shehzadi from the Muslim community. The alleged murderers were relatives, including parents, of the girl. The Ankit Saxena case particularly gained gravity because this went on to become a classic example of varied media houses’ bias reporting where mainstream media tried to conceal the religious identity of the girl’s family.