Silence surrounds girls’ death at Attappallam

WALAYAR: The botched-up rape case, in which two children aged 13 and nine were found dead, has sparked an uproar across the country but the community in Attappallam, where the family lived, is yet to make sense of the tragedy that unfolded before them.
Thankaraj, an elderly person living close to the one-room shed where the family put up, still remembers the fateful day.“I was in the fields when I heard the screams. The elder girl was found hanging. There were a few overturned chairs and a cot underneath the body. After 52 days, I heard the screams again. This time, they had found the younger daughter’s body,” said Thankaraj.
Most of the neighbours at the 11th ward of Puthussery panchayat said the parents need to share the blame for whatever that happened in their ramshackle house on January 13 and March 4 in 2017.
Most of them prefer to keep their mouths shut. Only a few were willing to come forward and talk. “If the girls were sexually abused, then whoever has done it, must be punished. But I think the parents need to be blamed as well. They let a stranger sleep in the one-room house. They should have been more careful, especially after coming to know that one of the girls was getting sexually abused,” said a neighbour.
“Both the children were full of life and fun. They used to climb the trees and even the electric poles around here. On the day the tragedy struck, I had seen the elder girl playing in front of her house some time before she was found dead. She was not that talkative. But the younger one was chatty,” said another neighbour.
Sreekrishnan, another neighbour, said: “I feel terribly for the girls. I don’t know what happened but I can’t believe she hung herself. Something doesn’t add up,” he said. But there are others who can’t imagine that the girls were murdered. “Our’s is not an area where such things happen,” said a neighbour.
A few others said they often used to hear heated arguments from the one-room shed at night. “People used to visit them frequently. But we never used to interfere with their affairs,” said another neighbour.
(The victim's identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme Court directives on cases related to sexual assault)