A 23-year-old college woman suffered 60 per cent burns after she was allegedly set on fire by unidentified persons under Tilhar police station area of Shahjahanpur district on Monday afternoon. The incident took place after she left the college, police said.

An undergraduate student of a college run by an Ashram of former Union Minister Chinmayanad, the woman is being treated at the Shyama Prasad Mukharjee Civil Hospital in Lucknow and her situation is said to be stable.

Police claimed to have recovered CCTV footage showing the woman leaving her college alone through the back gate. However, they said that so far she did not reveal the sequence of event that led to the incident, they added.

“Around 6.15 pm on Monday, we received an information that a woman with burns is standing on the roadside at Nagariya turn. Police teams soon reached the spot and rushed her to Sadar Hospital in the district. She was later referred to the Shyama Prasad Mukharjee hospital in Lucknow. Here in Shahjahanpur we repeatedly tried to talk to her, but she did not give us any details of the incident, even though she is talking about everything else,” said SP S Anand.

“Based on CCTV footage, we found that she left from her college on her own. We are requesting her parents to motivate her to cooperate with us. As per her father’s complaint, the woman was supposed to come back from her college at around 3.30 pm. Even though her father was present there to pick her up, she didn’t show up. It appears that some persons knowingly set her on fire. An FIR against unidentified persons has been registered at the police station concerned,” he added.

A police official in Shahjahanpur said the CCTV footage of her movement for around 3-4 km from the college has been recovered and it shows that she had taken an alternate route instead of the usual one.

Shahjahanpur SP (Rural) Sanjeev Kumar Bajpai said the victim’s cooperation could solve the case within hours, but she is reluctant to provide the details of the incident.