Three Sisters Found Hanging By Same Rope, Police Say Siblings Killed Themselves

The lifeless bodies of three sisters belonging to a tribal family in India were found hanging by the same rope from a tree in the Gotaghat village in Madhya Pradesh's Khandwa district on Tuesday, July 26.

Based on preliminary investigation police say the sisters, 23-year-old Sonu, 21-year-old Savitri, and 19-year-old Lalita killed themselves by knotting three loops on a rope and tying it to a neem tree.

"We got the information from the village Gotaghat under the Jawar police station limits that three sisters died by suicide at around 11 pm in the night. Prima facie it looks like a suicide. The family hasn’t mentioned any suspicious details or pointed towards anyone," said Superintendent of Police (SP) Vivek Singh.

The officer said the sisters probably had some "internal problems" that forced them to take this extreme step.

Since no last message or note was found so far, the investigators are probing further to identify if the incident was a case of murder.

"The short post-mortem report says the women died of asphyxiation. All angles are being investigated in the case," Khandwa SP Vivek Singh said.

The family consists of five sisters, three brothers, and a mother. Among the sisters, only Savitri was married.

"We don’t know what happened, but there must have been some reason. One of them was married, another was studying and one more sister used to work in the fields," one of the girls' brothers, Dinesh Chauhan, told the Quint.

Additional SP Seema Alawa, who is investigating the case, said they are "exploring the possibility of complexities in their relationships."

A similar incident was reported in India's Uttar Pradesh, where two minor sisters allegedly killed themselves by jumping in front of a freight train in the Dibiyapur area.

The lifeless bodies of the two sisters, 17-year-old Sapna, and 16-year-old Poonam, were found near the Kanchausi railway station along the Delhi-Howrah route on Monday, April 25, authorities added.

According to local media reports, the girls' family was in extreme poverty and this could have driven the siblings to take such an extreme step.

Their father, Ashok Nath, died three years ago and their mother is bed-ridden from a chronic ailment.

Extreme poverty had forced the teens to drop out of school and work as daily wage laborers to run the house and deal with the expenses of their mother's treatment, sources said.