Human skeleton found in Hathras home 30 years after man’s disappearance

PTI, Sep 28, 2024, 7:56 PM IST

Representative image (source: Shutterstock)

Hathras (UP): A human skeleton was unearthed in a house here in Hathras, 30 years after the death of a man who was alleged to have been killed by his two sons.

Police have sent the skeleton for forensic examination and are preparing to file an FIR against siblings Pradeep Kumar and Mukesh Kumar, their mother, and another individual.

Punjabi Singh, a native of Giloundpur village and the youngest of the four sons of Buddha Ram, said he remembered hearing his two eldest brothers arguing with his father a night before his disappearance.

“I used to sleep with my father when I was young. I still remember that one night my two elder brothers who were then in their twenties along with another man asked me to sleep in the other room,” recalled Punjabi Singh who was around nine years old at the time of the incident .

“I couldn’t sleep that night. So I decided to come out and see. That’s when I heard my brothers fighting with my father in one room. I got scared and hid in a corner,” Singh told PTI on Saturday.

The next day, Singh noticed a freshly dug ditch in the porch of the house.

“The next thing I remember is a deep hole dug in the porch of the house which I found after returning from school the next day,” he recalled. “When I asked my mother she told me that my father had gone somewhere.” Singh kept the details to himself for more than a decade and confided in his another brother, Basti Ram, only when he was around 25 years old.

“I first told about the incident to my elder brother. After talking to him, my suspicion became firm about the role of both my eldest brothers in my father’s disappearance,” he added.

Singh claimed that he had also approached police eight years ago with the same complainant but the then in-charge of the police station closed the investigation terming it a property dispute.

“This time we decided to approach senior officers and that resulted in the police action,” said Singh.

Singh, with the support of Basti Ram, had approached the district administration around two months ago, alleging his father was murdered.

A police team, along with forensic experts, excavated the porch of his ancestral house on Thursday and discovered the skeletal remains.

Area Circle Officer Himanshu Mathur said on Saturday, “The skeletal remains were sent for post mortem. We will also conduct a DNA examination on the direction of the court. The local police station is also in the process of filing an FIR against the accused.”