Korean game theory ruled out in Ghaziabad sisters' suicide? Police cite father's Rs 2 cr debt as key factor

• Police probe deaths of three sisters in Ghaziabad, dismissing online game link
• Family faced Rs 2 crore debt, stress, and limited access to Korean dramas.
• Probe targets financial strain, household dysfunction as main factors

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A complex tapestry of severe financial distress, familial discord and the potent influence of emotional Korean dramas is emerging as the focus of the investigation into the deaths of three sisters who fell from their ninth-floor apartment in Ghaziabad earlier this week.

Police have dismissed the father’s initial claim that an online "game" was responsible, revealing instead a household buckling under a Rs 2 crore debt, as per an NDTV report. The sisters — Nishika, 16; Prachi, 14; and Pakhi, 12 — died in the early hours of Wednesday after residents of their high-rise complex heard the impact,

An eyewitness, Arun Singh, reportedly a native of Gaya in Bihar who lives in a rented flat in the society, recounted a harrowing scene from his adjacent balcony. He described seeing one girl, believed to be the eldest, with her back to the edge, while the two younger sisters clung to her in a desperate attempt to pull her back before all three fell.

Police, who found the girls’ bedroom door locked from inside and had to break it down, discovered poignant clues. A pocket diary contained a message urging their parents to read it “because it is all true.”

Poetic lines and film dialogues were scribbled elsewhere and family photographs were arranged in a circle. On a mobile phone, the sisters had used a picture of themselves as wallpaper, adorning it with self-chosen Korean names.

While these findings pointed to a deep engagement with dramatic narratives, authorities have squarely shifted attention to the family’s dire circumstances.

The girls’ father, Chetan Kumar, a stock trader, is burdened by a debt of approximately Rs 2 crore, a pressure the police say crippled the household. Kumar, who has two wives — the second being his first wife’s sister — reportedly sold his daughters’ mobile phones to pay an electricity bill and had threatened to marry the girls off.

“He did not send the girls to school even after the COVID-19 pandemic subsided. The reason for this was the huge debt burden. He never bothered to send the children to school again,” a police official was quoted by NDTV as saying.

Last week, Kumar also stopped allowing the girls to use his or his wife’s phone to watch content — an action police speculate may have deeply offended the sisters, who were avid consumers of Korean dramas.

The family’s struggles were compounded by caring for Kumar’s 14-year-old son from his first marriage, who is mentally challenged. Kumar had reportedly told police the family previously lived in northeast Delhi's Khajoori Khas before moving to the Ghaziabad flat three years ago, a household increasingly isolated by its financial desperation.

Although the father had suggested the tragedy was linked to a Korean game involving suicidal tasks, police have expressly ruled this out. They acknowledge, however, that the emotional themes of the dramas the girls watched remain a factor under consideration.

The investigation suggests a confluence of influences: the escapism of the dramas, the sudden withdrawal of access to them and the crushing reality of their family’s debt and dysfunction.

The case has drawn inevitable, if preliminary, parallels to past online challenges like the ‘Blue Whale’ phenomenon. Yet, the current probe paints a more nuanced and tragic picture of three young lives caught between a fictional world of heightened emotion and an unbearable domestic reality. The police continue to investigate the sequence of events that led to that fatal moment on the balcony.