KATHMANDU, JANUARY 19

A newly-wed couple was found dead inside their rented apartment at Chagathali in Mahalaxmi Municipality of Lalitpur district yesterday.

The deceased have been identified as Sagar Pokharel, 32, a permanent resident of Rajbiraj, Saptari district, and his wife, Nirmala Khanal (Pokharel), 22.

They had married around five months ago. The couple was living with Sagar’s parents.

Preliminary police investigation showed they both committed suicide, the motive is still unknown to the police.

Superintendent of Police Prajwol Maharjan of the Metropolitan Police Range in Lalitpur said the couple had taken their lives after locking the entrance of their flat from inside at noon yesterday.

Sagar’s parents had gone to their married daughter’s house at Balkot in Bhaktapur a day earlier. “Yesterday, when the two elderly parents came back to their apartment they found the apartment locked from inside. Failing to enter the apartment, they took the help of neighbours to break into the room, where they found their son and daughter-in-law lying motionless in the bedroom,” Maharjan said.

Police also said the parents had rushed to the apartment after the deceased did not answer repeated phone calls made to them. Police also recovered a freshly opened packet of ‘selfoss’, a highly poisonous insecticide used to kill bugs in farms.

Sagar used to work as a veterinary material supplier. “Police have also collected vomit samples from the site, which will reveal more information about the cause of their deaths,” Maharjan said.

Similar incidents have repeated inside the valley in the past couple of weeks. On January 8, police found the body of Umesh KC, 33, a resident of Baneshwor, and his wife Sudikshya Giri, 33, at their rented apartment in Tokha. Umesh’s body was found on a bed while his wife’s body was hanging from the first floor.

Another similar incident occurred at the end of the first week of September last year wherein a family of three — Sudip Adhikari, 36, his wife Samjhana, 34, and his son Sushant, 15 — were found dead. But unlike yesterday’s case where the couple had committed suicide, in the other two cases the partners had killed their spouse and children before committing suicide.