A three-month-old toddler in Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore died after his genitals were mutilated allegedly by his 45-year-old grandmother. The toddler’s twin, a girl, was also found injured in the bathroom of their house wrapped in a dirty cloth. The gruesome crime took place on Thursday, October 21 in the twins’s house in Goundampalayam in the city. The Thudiyalur police are on the lookout for the grandmother Shanthi, who they say has fled the scene.

According to the police, Shanthi hails from Madurai and had been living with her daughter Aishwarya and her husband Baskaran for the last two months to take care of the twins. Aishwarya’s younger brother Hari was also living with them. On the evening of October 21, Aishwarya and Hari went to shop for groceries, leaving the twins alone with Shanthi. They returned home in half-an-hour. When they knocked on the door no one answered, so Aishwarya phoned her mother, who the police say told her daughter that she was in the bathroom. When Aishwarya finally entered the house, she found Aryan, the baby boy, bleeding from his injuries and covered in a cloth. Her daughter Aarika was in the bathroom, and had also sustained injuries.

While Aishwarya raised an alarm, her mother walked out to the road and asked for a lift from a passing two-wheeler and fled the scene. Police say she had disappeared like this before on several occasions, but she would return in a few days.

A case has been registered under section 302 of the IPC by the Thudiyalur police. The murder, according to the police statement, occurred at 8.45 pm on October 21. The postmortem on Aryan has been completed at the Coimbatore Government General Hospital and the report is still pending. Aarika is receiving medical treatment at Kuppusamy Naidu Hospital. She is currently in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital.

The search for Shanthi is still ongoing. Shanthi’s husband is a sub-inspector at the Mathichiyam police station in Madurai district.