Jilted lover burns girl’s scooty, blaze engulfs building, 7 dead, 9 critical

The Madhya Pradesh Police claimed to have arrested a person who had allegedly ignited a fire in a three-storey residential building that left seven people dead and nine injured in Indore.

Police on Sunday identified the accused as Sanjay Dikshit (27), who had committed the act in a rage after being rejected by a woman.

Indore’s Vijay Nagar police station in-charge Tehzeeb Qazi said the accused was nabbed on the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday and booked under the Indian Penal Code Sections 302 (murder) and 436 (mischief by fire intending to cause destruction of any building), the police said.

He had allegedly torched the scooter of a woman residing in the residential building in Vijay Nagar locality on Saturday after she rejected his marriage offer. Dikshit, a resident of Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, was working in a private firm here for the last couple of months, the police said.

Meanwhile, a video surfaced on social media purportedly showing Dikshit, having blood on hands and legs, lying on a stretcher in a hospital here, writhing in pain. The police said he had tried to flee the spot after committing the crime and in the process fell on the road in the Lohamandi area and got injured.

As per the police, Dikshit allegedly torched the woman’s scooter in the building’s parking area and soon the fire spread upwards, engulfing the premises.

“Earlier it had appeared that fire broke out due to short-circuit but after scanning CCTV footage of the houses near the gutted building, we found that a man ignited the blaze by setting fire to a vehicle in the building parking area,” the police said.

The police further said that Dikshit had vacated a rented flat in the building six months ago. He wanted to marry the woman who lived in the same building, but the woman was not interested and was going to marry someone else.

After setting the woman’s vehicle on fire, Dikshit fled to his friend’s place in the Niranjanpur area and later moved to the Lohamandi area, the police said.

As per the police, as many as seven people, including two women, were killed and five others received burn injuries in the incident.