A 22-year-old woman allegedly strangulated her one-year-old daughter to death before hanging herself from a ceiling fan in her one-room apartment at Budhanpur village near Sector 16 here on Wednesday.
The deceased have been identified as Pooja and her daughter Ananya.
Although no suicide note was recovered, police said the landlord and neighbours suspect Pooja’s strained relationship with her husband, Sharwan, drove her to this extreme step.
However, the woman’s family has given no complaint against Sharwan, who is a plumber.
“We are questioning the husband before taking any legal action,” said inspector Sukhdev Singh, who is the Sector-14 station house officer.
Husband found the bodies
Meanwhile, the landlord and neighbours said they suspected strained relations between husband Sharwan, who works as a plumber, and Pooja, who used to work as a housemaid and had left the job around two months ago, behind the incident.
Till the filing of this report, nobody from the deceased’s family, including her mother, had given any formal complaint against Pooja’s husband.
The police questioned the victim’s husband. Sukhdev Singh, SHO of the Sector 14 police station, said they questioned the husband and were working on some other angles. It would be premature to blame any other person for the death of the mother and daughter, he said.
The bodies of the mother and the child have been kept at the Sector 6 mortuary. These will be handed over to the family after a postmortem on Thursday.
Preliminary investigation revealed that the deaths took place between 9 am and 10 am when Pooja was alone with her daughter at home.
Her young sister, Aarti, who is a domestic help and lived with the couple, had gone for work while the husband was not present.
The deceased’s mother, Seema Devi, who is also a domestic help and lives with a family in Sector 16, Panchkula, was inconsolable. Neighbours said she had lost her husband a few years ago.
