AP police apprehend teen for setting fire around village to ‘reform’ her mother

Sanambatla: Affected by her mother’s ‘bad’ behaviour, a 19-year-old girl from Sanambatla village in Tirupati district went on an arson spree for about a month, setting fire in 12 places in the neighbourhood, police said on Monday.

Aimed at evicting her own family from the village in Chandragiri mandal to another place to ‘reform’ her mother, Keerthi, who failed in intermediate examinations has resorted to such extreme steps.

“Keerthi believed that incidents of fire could prompt her family to become superstitious and vacate the village to achieve her ultimate objective of reforming her mother. So, she started burning clothes in her family,” Tirupati ASP (Admin) J Venkat Rao told PTI on Monday.

Besides clothes, she set ablaze some haystacks as well, creating a fear psychosis in the village, resulting in some residents even conducting rituals to propitiate the Gods from any purported curse on the village, including the local MLA, police and government officials paying a visit to assuage the worried people and build some confidence.

In addition to burning clothes in her own house thrice, on April 30, May 12 and May 16, police said Keerthi did the same in neighbours homes as well.

She was so upset with her mother that she had even burnt the latter’s saree once while she was sleeping which fortunately did not end up in a disaster.

As police intensified vigil in the village and questioned several people, inlcuding men from Keerthi’s home, they finally zeroed in on her on Monday when she confessed to her pyromaniac behaviour around the village in the past one month.

In their investigation, police have learnt that Keerthi had started burning things even for silly reasons such as one of her friends not talking to her.

Further, police have also sent the burnt materials to the Forensic Sciences Laboratory (FSL), which concluded that no chemical was used in those incidents.

After concluding that Keerthi has resorted to such crimes, police registered a case under IPC sections 435 and 506, including recovering Rs 30,000 from her which she stole from her own mother.