A 36-year-old woman in Pune allegedly killed her partially-disabled son by beating him up with a cricket bat accusing him of making "sexual advances". The woman said she did so to protect herself.
Rakhi Balpande, employed at a multinational company in Pune, beat 13-year-old Chaitanya unconscious on Wednesday and left for work.
When she returned, she found him lying motionless and rushed him to the Sassoon General Hospital, according to The Times of India.
While some reports suggest that Rakhi murdered her son because of his requests to meet his dad, her estranged husband, other reports said that she thrashed her son for trying to "get physically intimate with her".
"When we interacted with her in the evening she confessed that she had thrashed her son with a bat after he tried to get physically intimate with her on Monday. She had given him painkillers but when she came home from work on Wednesday she noticed that Chaitanya was unconscious and she rushed him to the hospital," assistant commissioner of police (Khadki division) Swapna Gore told the Mid-Day.
Gore also said that they immediately arrested the mother after noticing that Chaitanya was bleeding from his private parts.
The boy succumbed to multiple injuries to his kidneys and lungs.
The Mid-Day also quoted the family's neighbours as saying that the mother had stopped sending the boy to school after he finished class 6 and would not let him go out to play.
Tarun, the boy's father, who lives in Nagpur, rushed to the hospital and refused to accept initial reports of an accidental death, as claimed by his wife.
"When I saw my son's dead body, I could not believe my eyes. The police had filed a case of accidental death but I was waiting for the results of the post-mortem. I knew that she had beaten him because there were a lot of injury marks on his body," he told the Mid-Day.
The Pune mother has been booked under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
