Spurned lover who caused Indore building fire held; kin seek capital punishment

Police have arrested the spurned lover, who had allegedly ignited a fire in a three-storey residential building that left seven dead and nine injured here in Madhya Pradesh, an official said on Sunday.

The accused, Shubham aka Sanjay Dixit (27), was nabbed on the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday and booked under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 302 (Punishment for murder) and 436 (mischief by fire intending to destroy any building), the police said.

On Sunday, Dixit faced the anger of the relatives of some of the deceased and the elder sister of the woman who had spurned his marriage proposal, at a police station. They shouted at him and demanded that he be hanged to death. Meanwhile, a video has surfaced on social media purportedly showing Dixit, bleeding on his hands and legs, lying on a stretcher in a hospital here, writhing in pain.

Indore's Vijay Nagar police station in-charge Tehzeeb Qazi told PTI that Dixit sustained injuries when he tried to flee by jumping over a road divider on seeing the police and fell on the road in the Lohamandi area.

On Sunday, the elder sister of the 22-year-old woman, who had rejected Dixit's marriage proposal, slapped him when he was taken to the Vijay Nagar police station accompanied by police personnel.

Dixit was seen with a plaster on his hand and a leg and was limping. The incident occurred when the woman was visiting the police station demanding a meeting with her younger sister. Police personnel intervened and separated her from the accused, officials said. "What did you get by killing seven people?'' the elder sister shouted at the accused.

She alleged that Dixit was harassing her younger sister out of unrequited love for quite some time and and demanded that he be hanged. On Saturday morning, Dixit had allegedly torched the 22-year-old woman's scooter following which the fire from the building's parking area spread upwards, engulfing the premises, police earlier said.

Relatives of Ishwar Singh Sisodia (45) and Nitu Sisodia (44), who perished in the fire, also shouted at Dixit at the police station and demanded that he be hanged. Dixit, who originally hails from Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, was working in a private firm in Indore for the last couple of months, police had said.

He had vacated a rented flat in the gutted building six months ago. He wanted to marry the woman who lived in the same building, but she was going to marry another person, the police said.

After setting the woman's vehicle on fire, Dixit fled to his friend's place in the Niranjanpur area and later moved to the Lohamandi area, the police said.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)