India: Father hires contract killers to eliminate his wayward son

Patna: A man in Bihar hired contract killers to eliminate his son since he was fed up with his notorious activities which usually caused tension in the family, police said on Sunday. Police have arrested the accused along with five contract killers and forwarded all of them to jail.

Police said Anwarul Haque, 65, a resident of Bagahi-Sheikhpura village in Gopalganj district, paid Rs500,000 to his son’s murderers as the latter had turned his life into a veritable hell. The accused took up the step after his 45-year-old son Shafique Alam refused to mend his ways despite repeated warnings and advice.

According to the revelation made by the police, three persons brought Shafique to Bettiah town in neighbouring West Champaran district on a bike on some pretext and shot him dead at a lonely place. An empty cartridge was recovered from the site during the investigation.

Police said the victim who ran a general store in Gopalganj town was involved in illegal cattle trading. But what irked his father was the way he had taken money from many villagers to sell his ancestral properties which had caused tension in the family.

“Shafique had taken money from several villagers in the name of selling his ancestral property which his father strongly opposed. The man was also a habitual alcoholic and would assault anyone at home and hence his father decided to get rid of him,” a police official in charge of investigation Nirbhai Kumar Rai told the media on Sunday.

Contract killer

The increasing incidents of hiring of contract killers to kill own family members have baffled the police in the state. Last year, a youth from Patna had hired a contract killer to kill his retired father only because he would often admonish him for not giving proper attention to his study.

The youth had given Rs15,000 as advance to the contract killer and had himself carried the shooter on his bike to the place where his father was to be killed while he had gone for a morning walk in the Kumhrar locality of Patna, capital city of Bihar. The victim Dr Chandrashekhar Prasad had retired as a civil surgeon barely some weeks before he was killed.

In another incident reported from Patna district in 2018, a woman hired contract killers to eliminate her own son, apparently fed up with his scandalous activities. The woman had allegedly paid Rs40,000 to the contract killer to eliminate her son.

According to the woman, the entire village was irritated over her son’s illegal activities as he would sexually harass women of the locality and eve-tease girls while stealing and robbing had become his routine habit. The woman told the police that his son had made her life a veritable hell and hence she decided to kill him.

Yet another such incident was reported the same year from Munger district where a son hired two contract killers for Rs200,000 to shoot dead his soon-to-be-retired father employed with Indian railway to get a job on compassionate grounds. As luck would have it, the victim survived later.