Mumbai, Aug. 30: A schoolteacher and his wife who believe in an obscure cult “sacrificed” their teenage daughter so that they would be blessed with a son.

Unlike girl foetuses killed in the womb by parents craving sons, Rachna Tembhurne was 19 years old when she was strangled on Monday in a Maharashtra village, 60km from Nagpur.

A neighbour saw the parents, Raibhan and Sharada Tembhurne, “bathing Rachna’s naked body and performing some puja in the dead of the night” on Tuesday at their home in Kudegaon, Vidarbha.

“Later, they dug a pit and buried her. I rushed to the village sarpanch and told him about it,” Baliram Brahmankar added.

The police said Raibhan, 45, was induced into the murder by a woman named Damyanta, who lived with the family and propagated a cult called Sat-Yug.

“She told the villagers that Kal-Yug was ending and it was time to usher in Sat- Yug. She told them to live according to her commandments, but nobody took her seriously other than the teacher and his family,” said sub-divisional police officer A.R. Rajurkar.

Tembhurne and his wife had shaved their heads at Damyanta’s behest, but Rachna wouldn’t, the police said. This led to daily conflicts in the household. Damyanta has been arrested.

“The teacher had first told us that his daughter had died because she could not cope with the divine powers being transmitted to her,” Rajurkar said. “He told us, ‘After the tragic death, I gave Rachna a ceremonial burial’.”

Tembhurne later confessed, the police said.

Officers said this was the first human “sacrifice” in India since a village priest carried out one in Madhya Pradesh in March 2003.

Yesterday morning, a few hundred villagers gathered round Kudegaon police station demanding the teacher’s arrest. Soon, others from surrounding villages joined the crowd.

The police today exhumed Rachna’s body, sent it for post-mortem and arrested her father.