In a gruesome and shocking crime, a highly educated but extremely superstitious couple allegedly murdered their own two daughters in India, hoping to revive them within hours with the help of powers from beyond.
Indian police were shocked when they stepped into the crime scene and found the two victims lying dead on the ground in a pool of blood with the parents in a state of delirium in Andhra Pradesh's Chitoor district late on Sunday.
According to local media reports, after performing bizarre rituals at their home, the mother bashed the heads of her daughters, Sai Divya (22) and Alekhya (27), with a dumbbell and stabbed them to death with a trishul (a trident, commonly used in Hinduism). The bodies had been stripped naked in the prayer room with nothing but a red saree, a traditional Indian garment worn by women, draped over them.
The couple asked cops not to remove their daughters' bodies for a day, believing that the girls had been possessed by an evil spirit and would be resurrected by morning.
Neighbors claimed they had seen the girls circling the house to banish the spirits that inhabited them.
Purushottam Naidu (55) and Padmaja Naidu (50), the father and mother, have reportedly been under the influence of occult practices, and another ritual took place on the very night that they killed their daughters.
"Naidu is a professor of chemistry and vice-principal at the Government Girls' Degree College in Madanapalle, while Padmaja identifies herself as a gold medalist, postgraduate in mathematics, who was working at an IIT coaching institute," police officer Ravi Manohara Chary told NDTV.
The elder daughter, Alekhya, was a postgraduate student working at Bhopal's Indian Institute of Forest Management, while the younger was pursuing a career in music at the Chennai-based AR Rahman institute.
On Tuesday, when the couple was taken to hospital for a check-up, the mother repeatedly refused to take a Covid-19 test, claiming that she was the human form of the virus and shouting in English: “I am Lord Shiva. Shiva is come. Work is done.”
The killings came to light after Purushottam, the father, informed his colleague over the phone about the incident.
