Lucknow, April 25: A teenaged couple was today found dead in a locked car parked in the boy’s garage.

Police suspect carbon monoxide poisoning to be the cause of the deaths, but they are not ruling out murder.

The car’s air-conditioning was on and the garage door was shut.

Mohammad Sameer, a 19-year-old college student, and Charu Agarwal, 18, did not have any clothes on. There were no injury marks on their bodies. A bottle of cold drink was lying in the car. The bodies were found this morning when a servant opened the garage.

Charu’s father, Pradeep Agarwal, a jeweller, had lodged a complaint with police around 10 last night when she did not return home. She had gone for private tuition on her two-wheeler last evening.

Sameer had left home at 6 pm saying he was going to a friend’s place. His family, which owns a shoe shop in the city, lodged a missing diary late last night. Sources in the family said the two were probably having an affair.

District magistrate Ramendra Tripathi said the girl’s family suspects foul play and wants to treat the incident as murder. “We have kept all options open,” he said.

The police have picked up Sameer’s father Jameel for interrogation.

However, Umesh Srivastava, the Lucknow superintendent of police, said preliminary investigations suggest it was a case of carbon monoxide poisoning as there were no apparent signs of injuries on either of the bodies.

“We have to ascertain this after we get the post-mortem report.”

He added that the incident bears a striking resemblance to at least two other deaths.

In 1999, Shilpi Agarwal and Gautam Singh were found dead in a car in Patna in a garage owned by the boy’s family.

The car’s AC was on and the police had suspected carbon monoxide poisoning, but a murder investigation was also started. The case has not been solved yet.

Two years later, the bodies of a businessman and his sister-in-law were found inside a car in a garage in East Delhi’s Krishna Nagar.

Tests conducted on him suggested he had become unconscious after inhaling carbon monoxide.

The police said the man could not come out of the car as the space between the back seat and the front seat, where his body was lying, was too little.

According to car specialists, a high concentration of carbon monoxide produced by the engine following a leak could prove fatal.

Dinesh Tripathi, a motor mechanic expert who owns a car showroom in Lucknow, said carbon monoxide is an odourless, tasteless and colourless gas, which means people might inhale it without realising it.