GHAZIABAD: Three girls, half-sisters who spent every waking moment together, were found dead next to each other on the premises of Bharat City in Ghaziabad, directly under a bedroom window of their ninth-floor flat. The tragedy unfolded around 2am on Wednesday, according to Bharat City resident Arun Kumar, who told TOI he saw the three girls fall. The sisters were 16, 14 and 12 years old.According to Kumar’s account, the eldest girl sat on the window with her back to the compound. The two other girls stood in front of her, hugging her tightly. Suddenly, the girl on the window leaned back and fell to the ground. Within seconds, the two other girls jumped, Kumar said. All three died on the spot. “I ran down and called the ambulance. I made more than 10 calls to the ambulance, but they came around 3.15am,” said Kumar, who lives in another tower and was standing on his balcony.
A one-page note they left for their father hinted at the turbulent state of mind of the girls, who did not go to school. The note had both an apology – ‘Sorry Papa’ – and instructions to him to read their diary – ‘READ NOW’.The diary, which TOI has seen, reveals that the girls had a deep obsession for all things ‘K’ (Korean), from pop to BL (boy love) dramas to culture, and despised their father for opposing it. “Sorry papa, Korea was our life. How did you even dare to take this from us?” reads a line in the diary.Police sources said this could be a reference to their father Chetan Kumar, a stock trader allegedly deep in debt, taking away the elder daughter’s phone 15 days ago and selling it.
Chetan did not deny the girls’ K-obsession. “They listened to Korean music, watched Korean films, dramas, web series and cartoons. They also wanted to go to Korea. All three girls wanted us to accept Korean culture, but when we refused, their behaviour towards us changed and they went into a shell. They lived in their own world,” he said.Chetan said he was asleep in an adjacent room and woke up hearing screams in the house. There were five children in the house. According to police, Chetan lives with three women who are sisters and claims to have married all of them. The eldest girl who died and a younger boy were from his first wife, who he married 18 years ago. The 14- and 12-year-old girls who died were from her younger sister, and a four-year-old girl, referred to as ‘Devu’ in the girls’ diary, was from his wife’s youngest sister.The tipping point for the girls, according to the note, was their attempt to initiate ‘Devu’ into their K-world being rebuffed by the parents and their younger sibling taking to Bollywood instead.Nimish Patil, DCP of Trans-Hindon, said Sachin called 112 police helpline. Police took the girls to a hospital where doctors declared them dead on arrival. “Our initial investigation shows the girls were sleeping with their mother in a room while Chetan was sleeping with his son. Around 1.45am, the girls woke each other up and went to the kitchen on the pretext of having water. But they went to the puja room and locked the door from inside. They used a plastic stool to climb to the window. Their mother woke up and asked them to open the door, but they did not respond. According to Chetan, the two other girls were still in the room when he woke up to find the eldest girl lying on the compound. The two other daughters also jumped after that,” Patil said.A police field unit broke the door of the puja room and found childhood photographs of the three girls strewn across the floor along with a mobile phone and the pocket-sized diary that they instructed their father to read. “The girls took the mobile phone of their mother before going to the puja room. We have sent it to a forensic team for investigation,” Patil said, adding there were frequent spats in the house over the girls obsessing about Korea.“It’s likely that they wrote the diary one or two days ago after a heated exchange with their father,” a police officer said.
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