03 March,2011 06:36 AM IST | | Ketan Ranga
Cops arrested two of his aunts for scalding, thrashing, and verbally abusing him
For the seven months he stayed with them, Abbas (name changed) might as well have been in a concentration camp.
Subject to singing burns with a white-hot knife, daily flogging and verbal abuses and taunts, he endured, perhaps, because he was too young to even grasp what was happening to him: he is all of three years old.
The child's wretched days ended on Tuesday, when the Mumbra police arrested his paternal aunts Nafisa and Jabin, wives of Ashiq Ali and Mohammed Hussain for causing grievous injuries to the child with a weapon.
But the scars will sear him for the rest of his life, said one of his relatives who complained against the aunts.
The child's wounds were bared to the world when the two aunts, tired of lacerating Abbas, left him at the house of one of his relatives, Suraiya Sheikh, Abbas' aunt on the distaff side.
'He couldn't walk'
Sheikh, who lives in Trombay, said, "Abbas' mother, Rehana, divorced his father as he was mentally unstable, and married another man eight months ago.
The sisters of her first husband volunteered to take care of the child. They even wrote it on a stamp paper and took the kid with them seven months ago."
For all this time, Sheikh had believed Abbas was in good hands. But on February 25, she was in for a horror.
"That day, when I came back home, I found Abbas there. His aunts had dropped him off at my place in my absence.
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I was shocked to see that his whole body was scarred and scalded. He couldn't even walk. We admitted him at Sion hospital. On March 1, police finally registered a case and arrested the two women."
Child's account
When the cops took a look at the child, they found his body charred at various places, gaping lacerations on his skin that covered broken bones, debilitating him to walk.
The arrests came after the boy himself gave a statement to the cops.
Recounting the terror, he said of his kin, "They beat me up daily. They'd scald my body with a hot knife. When I cried, they abused my mother and me. They have been beating me up for countless days."
The aunts were fed up of rearing the child and began grudging the responsibility. They would taunt Abbas about how his mother had absconded him to marry another man, and how he was a burden on them.
The officer at Mumbra police station confirmed that they have registered a case against the four.
They beat me up daily. They'd poke me with a hot knife. When I cried, they abused my mother and me. They have been beating me up for countless days.
Abbas (3), recounting his days of terror
