Honour killing? DU student ‘abducted’ from near Delhi home, beaten to death in UP's Baghpat

MEERUT/NEW DELHI: A second-year BA student of Delhi University's School of Open Learning was allegedly abducted from near his home in northeast Delhi, taken to Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh and beaten to death on Saturday. The family accused of killing the boy, Himanshu Sharma, claimed he had raped their 19-year-old daughter and had been blackmailing her. The boy's mother refuted the charges.Police have filed an FIR against seven people.
The mother of the 20-year-old man , Rajni Sharma, said, "The allegations are a lie. There was no woman involved." His uncle, Anil Kumar Sharma, added, "Himanshu received a call from the girl's phone on Saturday. Once he left home, four to five of her family members abducted him to Baghpat, killed him."
While Baghpat Kotwali circle officer Harish Bhadauria confirmed the arrest of two in the case, NP Singh, ASP, Baghpat, said, "In her complaint, the girl's mother claimed her daughter was being blackmailed by Himanshu after he had raped her."
The girl confided in her brother, who stays in a village in Baghpat. The brother and some relatives reached Delhi, lured the youth with a message from the woman's phone, abducted him and brought him to Baghpat. They intended to teach him a lesson, but the beating went too far," said ASP Baghpat.
The FIR accessed by TOI lists seven members of the girl's family, including her mother. They have been booked under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita's sections 140 (kidnapping or abducting in order to murder or for ransom etc), 103 (1) (murder).
For the past 12 years, Rajni had been raising her two children, Himanshu and his younger sister, on her own after her husband abandoned the family. She runs a small grocery shop and stitches clothes to make ends meet in northeast Delhi's New Usmanpur. Himanshu's mother claimed that feeling a sense of unease around 5pm on Saturday, after her son had left home after being "invited to a birthday party", she called Himanshu, only to find his phone switched off. "I waited for him until around 10pm and then alerted my relatives about my missing son," said Rajni. "Around 10.30pm, a woman who lives in the neighbourhood and whose son had phoned Himanshu called me to her house."
There, Rajni claimed, the woman told her that her son had been kidnapped.
The woman also made a video call to people she knew in which they showed Himanshu in their custody and said they would kill him.
"We knew the woman well since she often came to our house," said Rajni. "The woman told me that if I wanted to see my son again, I should accompany her."
The woman took Rajni to a forest in Baghpat. "We saw a car bearing Delhi number plate there," Rajni claimed. "My son was in the car with blood spattered everywhere." She was preparing to take her son to hospital when a police control room van arrived and nabbed two of the accused.
Asked whether Himanshu was in a relationship with the girl as alleged by the accused, the Sharma family insisted they weren't aware of such a thing. A weeping Rajni said, "Our dreams have been completely crushed. If they had problems, why didn't they speak to me first? Did they have to kill him?