In Uttar Pradesh’s Deoria district, three fraudsters allegedly manipulated the confidence of a young boy to embezzle valuable jewelery ₹85 lakh by providing him with momos, police said on Monday.
A formal complaint was lodged at the Rampur Karkhana police station in Deoria after the boy’s father alleged that three suspects running a roadside momo stall in Dumri Chauraha disappeared with his family’s high-value ornaments.
The incident came to light when the boy’s sister searched for her belongings but found the storage unit completely empty. The seventh-grader finally admitted to stunned relatives that he had given the jewelry in exchange for snacks.
Station Officer Devendra Kumar Singh confirmed that the legal proceedings were initiated following the statement of Vimlesh Mishra, a priest serving in Varanasi.
Law enforcers are currently on the lookout for the missing suspects while a comprehensive investigation into the scam is ongoing, according to the SHO.
Mishra’s report said the men targeted his son, who stays in the village for schooling. The trio deprived the boy of food, leading him to take over and hand over the family’s valuables.
The father noted that the stolen items belonged to both of his children.
Wife, her family strangled man to death in Bareilly
In another shocking case from UP, a man was allegedly strangled to death by his wife while her parents and brother restrained him. His remains were then hung from a window with a muffler to simulate suicide, authorities said Sunday.
The wife and her parents were taken into custody after a forensic examination identified strangulation as the definitive cause of death, effectively ruling out the suicide theory, officials noted.
According to circle officer Pankaj Srivastava, the victim, 33-year-old Jitendra Kumar Yadav of Etawah, was found hanging in his rented residence in Izzat Nagar police jurisdiction on January 26.
Jitendra, a contract worker at the Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI), shared a house in Kailashpuram’s Girja Shankar Colony with his wife Jyoti.
While it was initially ruled a suicide, a formal complaint by the victim’s brother, Ajay Kumar, prompted a case of attempted suicide and a subsequent autopsy.
“The post-mortem confirmed that the cause of death was strangulation,” Srivastava said, adding that the accused were subsequently charged with murder.
On Saturday, police arrested Jyoti and her parents Kalicharan and Chameli from Durga Nagar area.
Law enforcers are currently on the hunt for Jyoti’s brother Deepak, who is also involved in the crime.
During interrogation, Jyoti reportedly revealed that the couple had known each other since their student days and got married last year with the consent of their parents. At the time of the incident, Jitendra was holding a contract position with IVRI, while Jyoti was serving as a contract conductor for the state-run transport corporation.