He showed up at the police station to turn himself in, throwing the officers into panic:
with three fingers he held the severed head of his seventeen-year-old daughter, still bleeding
.
The umpteenth and macabre tragedy happened yesterday in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India and also the one in which violence has the greatest impact.
The man, Sarvesh Kumar, came up with himself by
confessing that he had lost his reason
, for having surprised his daughter with a boy he did not like.
In the video shot by the police, the man tells of having found his daughter alone in the house, and of having beheaded her with a knife, after having locked her in a room.
One of the officers was suspended for having his picture taken holding his head "disrespectfully".
Femicides of this type are still
common in rural India
, where fathers, often accompanied by other relatives, feel entitled to punish with death their daughters who "ruin the honor of the family" by starting relationships with men of class, religion or caste other than theirs.
There are no precise data, but it is estimated that every year there are several thousand murders of girls brutally killed by their families, and of whom it is then said that they committed suicide.
In Uttar Pradesh,
crimes against women have grown 66% since 2015
.
The period coincides with the arrival to the state government of the Hindu fundamentalist monk Yogi Adityanath, in power since 2017.