Three Odisha girls found hanging from tree in suicide pact

In an apparent case of a suicide pact, three girls, who were close friends of each other, were found hanging from a tree in Nabarangpur district on Saturday evening even as police continued to look for the reason behind the act

In an apparent case of a suicide pact, three girls, who were close friends of each other, were found hanging from a tree in Nabarangpur district on Saturday evening even as police continued to look for the reason behind the act.

Three girls, who were close friends of each other, were found hanging from a tree in Nabarangpur district on Saturday evening. (HT FILE PHOTO.)

Officials said the girls, two of them tribals from Tohra village under Umerkote block of Nabarangpur district, on Saturday evening went to a forest together at around 4 pm. When the girls did not come back home even after 9:30 pm, their families frantically searched for them and found the bodies hanging from a Kusum tree.

“The three girls were hanging from the tree branches by their duppattas. Their footwear was found near the tree. Though the post-mortem report is yet to be received, from the inquest report, suicide is strongly suspected. We have lodged three cases of unnatural death at the local police station,” said Nabarangpur SP Smith Parmar said. The girls were between 18 and 20 years of age.

According to the police, one of the girls was staying with her parents after getting separated from her husband while the other two were unmarried. The girls were often seen together, riding a scooty or taking a stroll on the village road. There were discrepancies in the age of two girls as their Aadhar card showed them to be minors but the school documents revealed they were over the age of 18 years. All the three girls were school dropouts.

Police said they are still investigating the reason for the suicide pact. “There could be admonition from parents over some issues or some kind of social sanction behind the suicide. The families of the deceased are not revealing much. We hope to get concrete information about the reason for the suicide by Monday,” Inspector of Umerkote police station, Naresh Kumar Pradhan said.

According to National Crime Records Bureau statistics, more people died of suicide in 2020 compared to Covid-19. A peer-reviewed study by a team of doctors from Veer Surendra Sai Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Sambalpur for the month of April-September 2020 said 38% of all the deaths during the period in 6 western Odisha districts were due to suicide. Of the 891 deaths reported to the hospital mortuary from 6 western Odisha districts, 340 were suicides. Around 40 per cent of the persons who died by suicide were in their 30s while 19 per cent were in their 40s.