Nellore: Unidentified persons set fire to a woman and her one-year-old child after pouring petrol on them in a secluded place between Pernamitta and Marellaguntapalem in Maddipadu mandal of Prakasam district late on Tuesday night.
The incident came to light when some locals alerted the police when they noticed the burning bodies.
According to the police, the woman is aged between 20 and 25 and the infant is between six months and a year.
The accused is suspected to have eliminated the woman by her hitting hard on the head with a boulder before setting fire to the body.
The impact of the hit was such that her skull was broken. The infant was killed by slitting her throat with a kitchen knife.
Based on the dress remaining on the unaffected part of the bodies, the woman was wearing a rose coloured Punjabi dress while the child was wearing an underwear and banian with a ‘Naughty Girl’ badge on it.
Police recovered the blood-stained boulder, blood-stained knife, burnt plastic bottle and a beer bottle smelling of petrol at the scene of the grisly crime.
Police said that some persons in Ayyappa Deeksha have told them that they have seen the woman and a man travelling on a bike and also noticed heated exchanges between them close to the place where they were killed.
Prakasam, SP, Siddharth Kaushal, inspected the murder scene late on Tuesday night and formed as many as 14 teams to trace the accused.
The teams have been verifying video footage in toll-plazas and other towns in Prakasam to establish the identity of the victims.
Sources in police said the woman is likely to be from a lower middle-class family going by her clothes.
They said that they have been looking at the beneficiaries’ list of ‘Pradhana Manthri Matritva Vandana Yojana scheme, where Rs 6,000 is given to the pregnant women right from conception to delivery, to see if they might establish the identity of the victim.
“Asha workers and ANMs have been enrolling almost all pregnant women everywhere to avail the scheme,” police said.
