Debabrata Mohanty and Shruti Tomar
Bhubaneswar/Bhopal: An 18-year-old woman from Madhya Pradesh found dead on Puri sea beach over the weekend due to drowning, police said on Tuesday citing multiple witnesses and CCTV footage which confirmed she walked into the sea at Puri on Wednesday last.
The woman’s body turned up on the Puri beach near Penthakata on Saturday, leading her family to allege that someone tried to burn her face with acid after she was raped
The woman came to Puri from Bina in Madhya Pradesh with her parents and other family members on November 21 and rented two rooms at Hotel Shanti Palace on Chakratirtha Road.
“We booked a vehicle and on November 22 we had gone to Chilika lake. On November 23 morning, we were getting ready to go to Bhubaneswar when I found my daughter missing from her room. In the CCTV footage of the hotel, she was seen going downstairs alone at 5.40am. We didn’t find her anywhere so we informed the police. The police reached the spot and started searching but she was not found. After this, we went to the police station at 7.30pm and filed a missing person’s complaint,” said the father of the woman.
Her body was washed ashore four days later on November 26.
A senior police officer said there was little doubt that the woman died due to drowning. “The post-mortem report has clearly said that death was due to drowning. We checked the CCTV footage of that morning around the hotel which showed the woman walking all alone to sea. Some sellers of beads on the sea beach also saw her going alone into the water. It’s possible that she drowned accidentally or she wanted to end her life,” said additional superintendent of police Kishore Mund.
A second police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said it was not unusual for bodies that are washed ashore to be disfigured and blackened.
Police said the teenager and her father had an argument the night before the incident.
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