Sujatha Bhat, the woman who filed a police complaint alleging that her daughter Ananya Bhat had gone missing in Dharmasthala in 2003, has now claimed that Ananya is her friends’ daughter and not hers. These claims, made in an interview to Republic Kannada, contradict many of her claims so far.
Appearing on Republic Kannada, Sujatha Bhat has now claimed that Ananya Bhat was the daughter of her friends Aravind and Vimala, and that she had lied about it “because circumstances had forced her to”.
Sujatha now claims Ananya was the daughter of her friends Aravind and Vimala who lived in Suratkal, and that she had looked after Ananya as if she were her own daughter when she was young. She has also claimed that she used to visit the couple in their house in Suratkal, near Mangaluru, on and off for many years.
In her interview to Republic Kannada, she also claimed that she had travelled with Aravind, Vimala, and their daughter Ananya to Dharmasthala and Kukke Subrahmanya temples.
When they were in Dharmasthala, Sujatha claimed that Ananya went missing and that when she went looking for her, she saw Ananya being dragged away behind Bahubali betta by some men.
Sujatha claimed that she saw Ananya’s body the next day, some of her clothes were missing. She alleged she was not allowed to go near her body and was threatened.
She produced a letter, purportedly from Aravind and Vimala during the interview, telling her that she should make public what had happened to Ananya so that their daughter would find peace. Sujatha also claimed that the couple died by suicide and that their house in Suratkal had burned down.
Until now, Sujatha Bhat had claimed that she had a daughter named Ananya Bhat who went missing in Dharmasthala in 2003 when she was a medical student in Manipal, Udupi district. She claimed that when this happened, she was a clerk working with the CBI in Kolkata and that she was kidnapped and assaulted in Dharmasthala when she came looking for her daughter. She had also claimed that she was in a coma for three months.
An SIT source said that Sujatha’s last name was not Bhat and that she did not have a daughter. The SIT will, however, investigate the FIR lodged in the case to find if there was any Ananya.
“I made up the story of Ananya Bhat for the sake of property taken away from family. I did not want any of these allegations against me. I was not aware that it would go against me to this extent. Please spare me from this torment. My intentions were different,” she told Republic Kannada.
TNM had interviewed Sujatha when she filed a police complaint. At the time, she had told the media that she did not have Ananya’s picture. When the media raised questions about her claims, at first she said that she did not have a picture of her daughter. Later, however, she produced a picture. She now claims that the picture was someone else’s.