Ghaziabad software engineer murders wife, three children; sends confessional video on family WhatsApp group

Police said Sumit Kumar, who fled after the murder, also said on WhatsApp that he has purchased potassium cyanide to kill himself.

A 34-year-old software engineer allegedly murdered his wife and three children at their home in Ghaziabad’s Indirapuram and sent a video confessing the murders to a family group on WhatsApp, police said Sunday.

Police inside the Indirapuram house of software engineer Sumit Kumar on Sunday, April 21, 2019. (Sakib Ali / Hindustan Times)

Police said Sumit Kumar, who fled after the murder, also said on WhatsApp that he has purchased potassium cyanide to kill himself. Upon seeing the video, Kumar’s sister, who also stays in Indirapuram, alerted her brother-in-law, Pankaj Singh, who rushed to the flat.

“I found the door locked. I called the police who broke it open. We found the body of my sister and her three children with stab injuries,” Pankaj Singh claimed.

The police identified the four victims as Kumar’s wife Anshu Bala, 32, their five-year-old son Prathmesh and twins Aarav and Aakriti, both aged four. Bala worked as a teacher with a playschool in Indirapuram while Kumar had quit his job in December, relatives of the couple said. They got married in 2011.

“Sumit [Kumar] had been going through a financial crisis since he resigned from his job in December last year. My parents also stayed with them, but they had gone to attend a marriage around a week back. Sumit, his wife and three children were alone in the flat,” Singh said.

The bodies of four victims were sent for post-mortem and the police filed an FIR after the victim’s brother filed a complaint, said superintendent of police (city) Shlok Kumar. Sumit Kumar was booked under section 302 (murder) of IPC.

In his alleged confession video, Sumit Kumar said he laced the drink of his family with sedatives and thereafter killed them with a sharp object, the SP said. “We are trying to trace Sumit. His mobile phone is switched off,” he added.

Pankaj Singh said Sumit Kumar had earlier worked with several software companies in Gurugram, Noida and later went to Bengaluru in October, 2018. “He worked there for a couple of months but resigned in December last year. He then stayed with his brother in Bengaluru for two months. Then he came to Ghaziabad. It was only around Holi that we came to know he resigned. We do not know the reason. I spoke to him last on Friday and he was smoking continuously. There were issues due to financial problems and his behaviour had also become erratic,” Singh said.

In the video, Sumit Kumar also named a medical store owner who allegedly fleeced him when he was buying medicines. In turn, he said, he cheated the store owner of ₹1 lakh. Police said they are trying to verify his claims.

The guard of the housing society in which the family lived said that he saw Kumar leaving the main gate of the society late on Saturday night. “I saw him smoking downstairs around 11.30pm. Later, at around 3 am, I saw him going outside the main entrance by foot... I did not hear any sound from their second floor flat either,” said Indrajit Singh, the guard of the housing society.