From Delhi to Amritsar: How domestic property feuds are fuelling a global wave of family killings

When Debosmita Paul opened the door of her Delhi flat to a couple she knew, she welcomed them in and offered them water. Police say the pair had brought their 13-year-old son along precisely to project an air of domestic normality. Hours later the 49-year-old assistant professor at Delhi University was dead, allegedly bludgeoned by tenants who had been pressing her to sell a multi-crore ancestral property in West Bengal. Her siblings were reportedly willing, but Paul had refused and demanded the family vacate. The brutal calculus – murder conceived as a property transaction – set the tone for a week in which lethal family conflict erupted across three countries.

Some 400 kilometres north, in Amritsar, an Australian maths teacher vanished while visiting family. Sunil Sharma, who taught in Melbourne, had travelled to Punjab to resolve a property dispute with his brother. Indian police allege that Satish Sharma spiked his drink with sleeping pills, then delivered fatal blows with a baseball bat before dumping the body in a canal. Four people have been arrested and a search for remains continues. Viewed from the Indian diaspora in Australia, the case illustrates how ancestral land ties can stretch across continents and snap with homicidal force.

In Iran, the triggers were equally combustible yet distinct in their legal aftermath. On the outskirts of Tehran, a man shot two cousins with a sawn-off shotgun over a land quarrel, killing one, then fled illegally to Turkey. Weeks later the victim’s mother issued a formal, symbolic consent – a practice known as rizāyat-e suri – that under Iranian law can halt proceedings, though the fugitive remains abroad. The same week, traffic police in Kashan reported a fatal crash in which a wife grabbed the steering wheel during a heated argument; the car overturned, killing the couple instantly. Iranian journalists noted that the dividing line between spontaneous fury and premeditated violence is often erased when property and passion collide.

Turkey and the industrial belt of northern India added their own grim entries. In Kocaeli, a mother of five was stabbed eight times in the street by her husband after a dispute whose cause authorities have not yet disclosed. In Gurgaon, a 56-year-old security officer allegedly turned his licensed revolver on his family, firing four bullets into his wife, a school principal, and seven into their 27-year-old son, who helped run the school. The shooting followed a heated argument at home. In all these cases, the killer was not a stranger but an intimate, armed with intimate knowledge of the victim’s routines.

Analysts in London and Delhi point to the combustible intersection of soaring urban land values, the erosion of extended family bonds, and a ready availability of weapons – from licensed firearms to blunt instruments – as accelerants. The Iranian consent mechanism, designed to encourage restorative justice, demonstrates how easily legal instruments can be manipulated to shield perpetrators. Indian police, meanwhile, are grappling with a pattern of killings meticulously planned under the guise of family visits. As economic pressures mount and property remains the surest form of wealth, these domestic powder-kegs are unlikely to defuse.