Noida: Three persons were arrested for abetment to suicide after five members of a family, including three children, were found dead at their home in Greater Noida’s Rabupura on Saturday. Police said four audio recordings recovered from a phone in the house pointed to a property dispute within the family.The five who were found dead – frothing at the mouth – were Mahesh, his wife Lalita (35) and their children Laddu (11), Mishti (7) and Sakshat (3). On Sunday, police arrested Mahesh’s sisters Sunita (45) and Sapna (32), and Sunita’s husband Shekhar (50), all residents of Delhi. They were arrested on charges of abetment to suicide.According to Rabupura SHO Shyambabu Shukla, Sunita allegedly influenced their mother to have the family house transferred in her name in 2025, leaving Mahesh upset. Their mother lived in the same Rabupura house with Mahesh.“Four audio recordings, each around two minutes long, were recovered from Mahesh’s phone. In one, he can be heard blaming Sunita, Shekhar and Sapna for the extreme step. He did not blame his mother, who lived with them,” Shukla said.The recordings, sent from one phone to another, helped establish the family dispute and led to the arrests, police said.The sequence of events on Friday night is also central to the probe. Police examined CCTV footage near the house and found that Lalita had gone to a local fair with two children and some neighbours, while Mahesh stayed home with their son. She returned at 10.04pm.Police suspect that after she came back, Lalita prepared noodles for the family and Mahesh may have mixed a poisonous substance into it. The family ate and went to sleep, but none woke up the next morning. Used utensils were found in the house.The deaths came to light around 8am on Saturday, when a boy from the neighbourhood went to call the school-going children for an examination. When nobody answered to repeated knocks on the door, the child climbed over the boundary wall and opened the gate. The child’s mother then entered and found the family unresponsive.Mahesh and one child were on a cot. Lalita and the other two children were on a bed, with one child clinging to her lap. All five, police said, were frothing at the mouth, with no visible injuries.Police said the main gate was bolted from inside and CCTV checks showed no outsider entering the house. However, autopsies did not establish the cause of death. Viscera samples were preserved for forensic analysis.Food poisoning was initially suspected as reason for the deaths because the family had eaten noodles together and drunk tea before bed. But a preliminary inspection by food safety officials did not conclusively establish this as the cause. The forensic report, cops said, is expected to clarify whether a toxic substance was involved.
