Lucknow:

Residents of a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district were in for a shock on Wednesday morning when they spotted a man calmly walking down the road with the severed head of his 17-year-old daughter.

One of them, who spotted Sarvesh Kumar with the head walking down the road in Pandetara village – around 200 km from Lucknow, called the police.

Two officers came to intercept him started filming the approach on one of their phones. They ask him his name, where is from and whose head it was. Sarvesh replies without hesitation.

In the video, he admits to beheading his daughter with a sharp tool because he was unhappy with her relationship with a man.

“I did it. There was no one else. I closed the latch and did it. The body is in the room,” he is heard saying.

The police ask him to put the head down and sit by the road and once again he obliges without protest.

The policemen brought Sarvesh to the police station and arrested him.

Senior police officer Anurag Vats said the police will be filing charges against the man soon.

Uttar Pradesh topped the list of states with the highest number of crimes against women in 2019, the latest data released by the National Crime Record Bureau in September last year showed.

Uttar Pradesh also had the highest number of crimes against female children under the POCSO Act with 7,444 cases, followed by Maharashtra (6,402) and Madhya Pradesh (6,053).