Three minors – a 16-year-old girl and two of her half-sisters aged 14 and 12 – died after allegedly jumping from the ninth floor of a high -rise building in Ghaziabad, police said Wednesday.
Following the incident, cops said the three girls were clearly influenced by Korean culture, were “highly-addicted” to an online Korean game and obssessed with gaming on their mobile phones.
The three minors lived with their father, a forex trader, and their mothers, police said. They added that the eldest aged 16 was born to the trader’s first wife, while the other two were born to his second wife.
The minors have “left behind a lot of notes in a diary”, which contain an apology and a crying caricature, assistant police commissioner Atul Kumar Singh said according to an earlier HT report.
The police commissioner revealed that the minors were “addicted” to an “online task-based game”, and said the obssession had begun after the Covid-19 pandemic. “They were not attentive to their studies… the 16-year-old was still studying in class 4,” Singh said.
He added that the girls were “highly obsessed with the game and thought that they were not Indians, but Koreans.” “They also portrayed themselves as Korean princesses under the influence of the game,” Singh said.
The police said that while their family knew of the minors’ addiction and would snatch their mobile phones, the girls would “get them back” again. “They followed a daily life routine together; even went to the bathroom together. Their diary left behind has a lot of details about their lifestyle and their obsession with the task-based game,” Singh revealed.
Minors went inside puja room after midnight, locked it
The assistant police commissioner said that the girls were with their mothers after midnight on Wednesday. “After some time, they went to the puja room and locked it from inside,” Singh said.
Following this, the used a chair to access a window and jumped one by one from the ninth floor.
“The guards and locals on the ground floor woke up hearing the loud noise…even their family members on the ninth floor woke up,” Singh added. He said that the police were informed about the incident, and the bodies then sent for autopsy.
An eyewitness, Arun Kumar, told ANI news agency that the incident was “sudden”, and also termed it “abnormal.” “It occurred before I could have done anything or called anyone. They were sitting on the balcony glass…” he said. Kumar alleged that from what he saw, it seemed that one of them planned to jump, and the other two “fell trying to save her”, according to ANI.
