GHAZIABAD: A police team investigating the suicide case of three minor half-sisters at Bharat City on Feb 4 found that the girls were weak in studies but had not flunked in school.
The team visited a school in the Shalimar Garden area on Wednesday, which the three girls had attended until 2020, before they dropped out during the Covid pandemic.
School records showed that the eldest of the three girls had taken admission on April 1, 2019, in Class 3, while the youngest was in kindergarten (KG) in the same academic session. The third sister had taken admission to the school a year earlier, in 2018, in Class 1.
"They were promoted to senior classes under the Right to Education Act's no-detention policy. However, school staff said they were ‘very poor' in studies and did not complete their assignments," a senior police officer said.
The officer also told TOI that the girls eventually dropped out as they were not interested in studying at the school, but had not taken their transfer certificates. The school runs classes from nursery to Class 8.
The girls' father, Chetan Kumar, earlier told police that the girls had stopped going to school after they failed an exam.
The sisters—aged 16, 14 and 12—were found lying next to each other on the society premises after allegedly jumping from their ninth-floor window on Feb 4. They were taken to a hospital and declared dead on arrival. Investigations so far have shown that the sisters were addicted to online gaming.
Data recovered from a phone used by the sisters—sold by their father to a Shalimar Garden shop for Rs 15,000 about 15 days before the incident—showed that the girls were heavily invested in Korean culture, with K-pop featuring most prominently. A suicide note recovered from a diary written by the girls named horror or puzzle-survival games such as Poppy Playtime, The Baby in Yellow, Ice Cream Man, Evil Nun and Ice Game.
Forensic analysis of the phone also indicated that the girls spent almost 20 hours a day on the device watching Korean content, cartoons and gaming.
On Thursday, police said none of the students from the girls' batch was currently enrolled at the school, having moved on to higher education. Most of the staff was also replaced in 2023, and no teacher from that period remained to provide insights into the girls' behaviour or circumstances at the time.
A private tutor who briefly taught the girls earlier told police that they had introduced themselves to her using Korean names—Maria, Aliza and Cindy—and claimed they were adopted from Korea and China. "They were very weak in studies. When I gave them basic calculations, like addition and multiplication, they failed to even recognise numbers. When I asked them about their Korean names, they said they were adopted from China and Korea. I asked their father about it. He told me about their obsession," said the tutor, who stopped teaching them after a few lessons.
A police source, meanwhile, told TOI that Chetan was arrested for celebratory firing in Delhi's Shastri Park area in 2019. He fired into the air during a wedding but was later released on bail.
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Avishek Kumar is a city reporter at the Times of India in Noida a...
Read MoreAvishek Kumar is a city reporter at the Times of India in Noida and Ghaziabad. He reports on crime, fire, and traffic with a particular focus on civic issues. Over the course of more than five years in journalism, he covered a broad spectrum of city beats, including courts and civics. He is committed to pursuing leads and producing hard-hitting, fact-based, field-exclusive reports.
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