Wife and daughter of official held for graft cremated

A day after the wife and daughter of BK Bansal, a corporate affairs ministry official arrested on corruption charges by the CBI, allegedly committed suicide, their autopsies were performed at Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) hospital on Wednesday.

A day after the wife and daughter of BK Bansal, a corporate affairs ministry official arrested on corruption charges by the CBI, allegedly committed suicide, their autopsies were performed at Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) hospital on Wednesday.

BK Bansal after he was granted bail on Wednesday. (Ravi Choudhury/Hindustan Times)

The police said the postmortem could not be conducted on Tuesday because nobody from the family was available to identify and claim the bodies. Bansal was in CBI custody and his son, Yogesh, is still ‘untraceable’.

Director general (corporate affairs) Bansal’s 58-year-old wife Satyabala and daughter Neha, 28, were found hanging from ceiling fans of two separate rooms of their first-floor flat at Neelkanth Apartments in IP Extension on Tuesday afternoon.

Police sources said the mother-daughter duo was under stress since Bansal’s arrest and the raids at their flat on Saturday and Monday morning.

The bodies of Satyabala and Neha were cremated at Nigambodh Ghat in the presence of Bansal and other family members in the afternoon.

Read: Wife, daughter of govt officer held for graft commit suicide in Delhi

Bansal attended their last rites after a special CBI court granted him two-day interim bail to attend the funeral.

Their neighbours claimed that Yogesh turned up to attend the last rites. The police, however, could not verify the claims. According to police, Yogesh went missing after his father’s arrest. His mobiles were found switched off.

Bansals’ relatives on Wednesday told media persons that Satyabala and Neha were depressed because of the regular CBI raids.

The mother-daughter duo was probably driven to suicide because of the corruption taint on Bansal.

“In their notes, the two mentioned that after the CBI action, they lost the will to live. But they wrote nobody should be blamed for their death,” special commissioner of police (law and order, north) SBK Singh had said.

The shame and distress motive gained credibility from the “suicide notes” found in their Neelkanth Apartments flat in east Delhi’s IP Extension, which were written and signed in Hindi. They wrote that the decision to end their lives was their own. Police said they do not suspect any foul play in the case.