Jamshedpur/ Bangalore: A young doctor, hailing from Adityapur and working at AIIMS in New Delhi, hanged herself in a hotel room in Kochi, Kerala, late on Friday night, prompting her father to point an abetment finger at one of her colleagues whose marriage proposal she had recently spurned.

Mamta Rai (27) was attending a medical conference in the southern city. Her father Arvind Kumar Rai, a retired BSNL official who returned to Adityapur with her body on Sunday afternoon, has accused another doctor of AIIMS of "harassing" her for six months.

A policeman at Ernakulam Central thana in Kochi confirmed that an unnatural death case had been registered based on an FIR lodged by police. They said no complaint had been received from the victim's kin, but they were nonetheless probing the incident.

According to relatives, a suicide note was recovered from the hotel room where Mamta was found hanging from a ceiling fan. It is not immediately clear what the note said, but Rai insists that his daughter was forced to write it.

"I spoke to my daughter around 10.30pm (on Friday). She didn't seem suicidal at all. Something must have transpired in the next one hour (that led to her death around 11.30pm)," Rai told reporters outside their Adityapur home, 5km from Jamshedpur.

Mamta's colleague had apparently been pestering her to marry him for six months, but she refused and that allegedly made him aggressive.

"On January 2, the colleague had assaulted my daughter. He had also damaged her phone in fit of rage (on another occasion). He threatened her that he would harm us, her family, if she did not relent. He must have done something to compel her to write a suicide note," the father said.

After an autopsy was conducted in Kochi on Saturday, Kerala police handed over the body to Rai. She was flown in a body bag to Ranchi and then brought to Adityapur in an ambulance.

Mamta, the youngest among three siblings, did her schooling from DAV-Adityapur, her Plus Two from DAV-Shyamali in Ranchi and then her MBBS from Shillong Medical College. After finishing her postgraduate studies from AIIMS, she was posted in the dermatology department.

A pall of gloom descended on the densely populated Babakutir neighbourhood where the Rais live as the body reached Adityapur by road around 4pm. Ramashankar Prasad, a neighbour of the Rais, said he had last seen Mamta during Durga Puja. "The girl seemed happy. Her death is shocking," he added.