[dipu]

Under Indian law, neither the girls nor the father may be named in news reports.

The father, a 45-year-old agricultural laborer from a low-ranking caste, said in a telephone interview that the two girls were last seen alive Tuesday evening in a mango orchard, in the company of a man named Pappu Yadav. (The man's surname is the same as his caste.) The father said that a relative saw the girls with Yadav and two of Yadav's brothers and, for reasons he did not explain, the relative tried to intervene between Yadav and the girls.

At that point, one of the Yadav brothers pulled out a pistol "and put it to the head of my cousin-brother," the father said, using a common term in India for a close relative. "He got scared and ran away."

When he heard what had happened, the father said, he went to the local police station and asked that Yadav's house be searched. But the police officers, who are members of the Yadav caste, "took the side of the culprits," the father said. "They abused and misbehaved with us."

The next morning, when the two girls were found dead, a crowd of angry villagers gathered at the scene, accusing the police of complicity in the crime and blocking them from taking the bodies away. Calm was not restored until the early evening, after the police agreed to arrest the Yadav brothers and two police officers.

Udai Raj Singh, the chief government official in the district, said four suspects were arrested, including one of the officers; the other officer "is absconding," Singh said.

Another politician in the village, Kamal Kant Tiwari, said Yadav's family was new to the area, and few residents knew what to make of the allegations. "We know that some scuffle took place with those boys and the uncle of the girls," he said of the encounter Tuesday evening. "What happened after that is not very clear."