A 17-year-old girl has in her purported suicide note written that police refused to act against three “rich” youths who repeatedly harassed and threatened her in her Uttar Pradesh village, forcing her to take her own life.

“We begged before everybody but nobody listened to us, the poor. They (her tormentors) bribe and suppress everything…. These people used to ridicule us…. They didn’t let me fulfil my dream. They killed me when I was alive. They are rich people,” says the two-page Hindi note, made available by a police source to the local media.

“Vivek and his friends Hargyan and Imrat would show me a knife and threaten that they would kill me and my parents. They were not punished when I was alive. I hope they will be punished when I am dead. They trapped me, taking advantage of my helplessness. Punish them so that poor girls too can survive.”

The Class XII student from Moradabad district allegedly drank poison on Sunday and died at a private hospital on Monday.

Her family members say they visited Kundarki police station twice on Sunday but the police would not visit the hospital to see if the girl could give a statement.

They alleged the police arrested Vivek Singh, the prime accused, but on the bailable offence of causing disturbance to public peace and released him within a couple of hours.

The family’s allegations and the purported suicide note raise a question mark over chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s repeated claims about an improvement in policing and women’s safety. The note mentions an unnamed girl who it says often forced the victim to write to Vivek.

“She was my best friend but she would make me write to Vivek. I did that and she handed them to Vivek. They tried to kill me when I was going to school. So, I stopped going to school,” the note says.

The dead girl’s father told reporters in his village on Tuesday that the three accused had assaulted her on her way to school two days after Holi.

“Vivek Singh, Hargyan Singh and Imrat Singh from our village would misbehave with my daughter on her way to school and back. They assaulted her two days after Holi because she had resisted Vivek’s attempt on Holi to assault her sexually,” the father, a farmer, said.

“Vivek lives a few houses away from ours. He would come to our terrace and secretly make videos of my daughter bathing while we were in the fields. Later, he would circulate the video in the village.

“On March 8, Holi, he entered our house and tried to molest my daughter, brandishing a revolver. She told us when we returned. We went to the police station but the officers misbehaved with me and my daughter and shooed us away.

“My daughter would have been alive and continuing her education had these criminals not been allowed to roam free. The police’s inaction emboldened the criminals.”

Under pressure from the local media, the police made two arrests on Monday. “We have suspended Sachin Malik, sub-inspector of Kundarki, for dereliction of duty and arrested Vivek and Hargyan. Imrat is absconding and will be nabbed soon,” Moradabad senior superintendent of police Hemraj Meena said.

Adityanath, at an event in Lucknow on Tuesday, spoke of the “strength of our police force to provide security”.

On December 9 last year, he had said: “A criminal who would molest a sister, a daughter at an intersection… wouldn’t be able to do so now because CCTVs will record every incident, and the police will strike them down at the next intersection.”