Afraid to tell husband about giving birth to girlchild; mother kills newborn baby by throwing her on neighbour's terrace 

KOLKATA: Mother arrested for throwing newborn baby to death. The one arrested for the horrific murder is 22-year-old Bengal native Jharna. The incident took place on December 5. The woman killed the baby less than an hour after it was born. She gave birth to the baby at her sister's house and decided to kill it when she realised it was a girl. Police say the baby was thrown into a nearby vacant plot, but she fell onto the neighbour's terrace.

The body of the baby was found by a neighbour, Vinay Rawat, when he went up to the terrace in the morning. He immediately informed the police. The accused was found during a house-to-house search in the area. The neighbours told the police that Shankar Sen, from Paschim Medinipur in West Bengal, was living as a tenant in the house next door. The neighbor's statement that his sister-in-law, Jharna, had been there for a month and that she was pregnant, became crucial in the investigation.

Jharna and her sister Savita were present when the police reached the house. They told the police that Jharna gave birth at home because they could not afford to go to the hospital. They told the police that they had abandoned the baby, who had shown difficulty breathing at birth, thinking it was dead. However, this was proven to be a lie when the baby's postmortem report came out. The report confirmed that the baby died due to fatal injuries sustained in the fall. During a two-hour interrogation, the accused confessed to throwing the baby alive. Police found that the act was committed out of resentment over the birth of a girl instead of a boy.

Jharna married Badal, a native of Darbhanga in Bihar, a year and a half ago. According to the police, the woman had undergone a sex determination test at a private nursing home in Darbhanga five months ago. After learning that she was pregnant with a girl child, she went to a hospital for an abortion, but the doctors refused, citing medical complications. Jharna then approached some women in her family with the same request. She had also taken the medicines suggested by them to terminate the pregnancy. This caused her health to deteriorate.

Jharna had come to her sister Savita’s house in Ghaziabad’s Nehru Nagar on November 14. She refused to go to a hospital even when her sister insisted. She went into labour in the early hours of December 5 and delivered the baby at home around 6 am. Jharna told the police that she decided to kill the baby because she was afraid of telling her husband that she had a baby girl.