Days after two sisters were found hanging from a tree in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a post-mortem has reportedly confirmed that the girls were raped and murdered. The BBC’s Geeta Pandey reports from the girls’ village in Lakhimpur district where their families are trying to come to terms with their colossal loss. Torrential rains have lashed the region since Wednesday night, muddying the narrow path to their home in Tamoli Purva village, just over 200km (124 miles) from the state capital Lucknow.

The gloom inside the two-room home perfectly mirrors the grey skies outside. Here sits the Dalit (formerly known as untouchables) family of two sisters – 17 and 15 – whose lives were brutally cut short, when they were raped and strangled to death in a sugarcane field, not far away from their home. Their mother, the only witness to her daughters’ kidnappings by three men who came on a motorbike on Wednesday afternoon, sits on a rope bed, surrounded by female relatives. She is inconsolable.(BBC)…[+]