NEW DELHI: A father in India's commercial capital of Mumbai bludgeoned his daughter to death for having a clandestine romantic relationship with a boy from a lower caste. According to the police, the father caught his daughter red handed with the boy and banged her head repeatedly against the wall until she fell unconscious on Tuesday. Later, he took her to hospital the same night and claimed that the girl had died of tuberculosis the previous night. “Kitabuddin (the girl's father) said that when he woke up in the next morning and roused the girl, he found that she was unconscious and was rushed to Rajawadi hospital (in Mumbai). Only when we performed an autopsy did we find that the victim had died from a head injury. When the accused was detained for misleading the investigation, he confessed to the crime. Kitabuddin has been booked under Section 302 (murder), 201(causing disappearance of evidence of offense) of IPC,” a police inspector investigating the case said. The 19-year-old girl Tabassum Khatun had got involved with 21-year-old Imran Khan, who was living as a paying guest in the upper floor of their apartment and was romantically involved with Tabssum the past four months. The two had even sought the permission of the deceased's parents to legalize their relationship in matrimony. However the parents would have none of it, as Khan was from a lower caste. On Sunday, night the father Mohammad Kitabuddin Abdul Gafur Shah was awoken with a sudden sound and caught the two in the middle of a clandestine meeting, when in a fit of rage he killed his daughter. Inter-caste marriage is still a taboo in India, both among Hindus and Muslims often leading to ‘honor killings' where the elders of the family get rid of their own family members for having slighted the family's ‘repute' and ‘honor'.
