Patna: The love for Facebook chatting has spoiled the happily married life of a woman in Bihar who eloped with another boy, leaving behind her first husband and two children.

Police said initially Anju Devi’s parents registered a case of murder against her in-laws suspecting she might have been killed over the issue of dowry which is quite common in this eastern Indian state.

However, the police suspected some foul play when they found money getting constantly withdrawn from the ATM account of the missing woman’s teacher husband Manoj Kumar, a resident of Maner-Telpa village in Patna district.

Later, on the basis of her mobile call locations, the police arrested both the woman and her boyfriend Krishna Ramarao from the south Indian city of Hyderabad on Thursday and it was only then that the entire story came to light.

During interrogation, she told the police that she was married to a teacher from a local village but she hated village life and wanted to settle in town as she favoured modern lifestyle. Their marriage had taken place in 2002. Out of frustration, the woman who too worked as a teacher even resigned from service later.

In the meantime, she became friend with Hyderabad boy, a divorcee, on the Facebook and began frequently chatting with him. She found in him her “dream boy” who lived in a big town and who could have fulfilled her long-cherished dream of settling in a mega city. Soon their friendship developed into a full-blown love, and out of this love she finally eloped with her boyfriend who had come to receive her at the Patna junction on January 1 this year. Since then she had been living with her boyfriend in Hyderabad until her lure for lucre brought the Patna police to her secret location in Hyderabad and landed them in jail.

During her police custody, the woman even refused returning to her previous husband, so was her first husband too refused living with her wife. “She is a woman with free thinking who hates rural setting. I just can’t live with her... Divorce is the only way out,” Manoj has told the local media.

He added that respecting her wish to stay in the town, he even had purchased a plot of land in Patna to build a home and settle there. “Yet she ditched me... The incident will never be erased from my memory.”

The police are now concerned about who will take care of the children — her first husband or her boyfriend whom she claims to have married. The woman has a seven-year-old son and a four-year-old girl from her first husband.