Man allegedly murders woman he befriended online and met for the first time on Friday

In a tragic love story that ended beside the Dhuandhaar Falls of River Narmada amidst Jabalpur’s Bhedaghat marble cliffs, a 22-year old man shot and killed a 43-year old woman whom he met in person for the first time on Friday.

Police believe that the man from Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar named Vineet Kumar, a matriculate who courted the Jabalpur-based homemaker on Facebook, then shot himself in the heart with the same country-made pistol.

According to Superintendent of Police (Jabalpur) Harinarayanachari Mishra, locals found Mr. Kumar lying with a gunshot wound on his chest at 8 p.m. near the waterfall. He was rushed to a hospital where he told the doctor that he was with a woman whom he met on Facebook and that she had three children.

“He kept repeating this. When asked if he had shot her, he fell silent. The man then fell unconscious and died later at night,” Mr. Mishra told The Hindu. Police found the body of the woman, the wife of an irrigation department clerk whose eldest daughter is 22, lying cold on the marble rocks.

At dawn, the pistol was also found in a puddle and was sent to Forensic Sciences Laboratory, Sagar. Both deceased suffered single gun shots directly on the heart at point blank range. It is common in rural Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to carry a pistol on a date for protection from other suitors or the girl’s family.

Initial investigations reveal that the man left home saying he was going to look for work in Punjab and Delhi. The woman too left home on Friday morning saying that she was going to her parents’ home, also in Jabalpur, for a couple of days. She is believed to have met him at the railway station.

Mishra added that the investigators had not reached a conclusion yet and all angles were being probed, although circumstantial evidence suggests that Vineet was the shooter.

“The woman had multiple Facebook profiles in which she had not revealed her real age. Coincidentally, the man had posted a picture of a pistol (not the same one) on his wall recently. She was the only one to like and comment on it,” Mishra said.