Patna: Two girls from a state-run shelter home were brought dead to the Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH) on Saturday, hours after the police raided the premises and arrested a middle-aged man for allegedly luring the inmates to elope with him.
Sources said that prime facie it appears the functionaries of the Asra shelter home, which is run by the Social Welfare Department in Patna’s Nepali Nagar area, concealed the deaths from the police.
Doctors at PMCH told reporters that the bodies were brought to the hospital on Saturday evening and the post-mortem was completed by night. A large contingent of Patna Police reached the shelter home on Sunday morning to investigate the matter.
Close on the heels of horrific revelations of rapes at a state-run shelter in Muzaffarpur, police had raided the Asra home in Patna after receiving complaints that a 50-year-old man named Ram Nagina Singh alias Banarasi, who lived nearby, was trying to persuade them to flee in exchange for gifts.
“We visited the shelter home and questioned the inmates and others. We also interrogated Banarasi. He was arrested and sent to jail. Security has been tightened around the shelter home,” Deputy Superintendent of Police (Law and Order), Patna, Manoj Kumar Sudhanshu had told PTI on Saturday.
Asked about Banarasi’s motive, he had said the matter was still under investigation. “It appeared that he had, indeed, asked some of the girls to run away and promised them gifts,” Sudhanshu said.
The case is likely to turn up the heat on the Nitish Kumar government following the Muzaffarpur horror, wherein more than 30 girls were allegedly raped over a period of time by the chief of the NGO that used to run the facility, which has since been closed.