Bhubaneswar, Aug. 9: A 19-year-old girl committed suicide this morning by hanging herself from the ceiling fan of her bedroom because she was stricken by the death of her pet cat.

The girl, Priyambada Pradhan, was a second-year student of a private engineering college located on the outskirts of the city. Her family stays in Tamando. Her father Pratap Chandra Pradhan is a Hindi teacher at B.B. Bidyapith in Tamando.

Her family members said Priyambada loved her cat very much and had been nursing it for the past two days as the animal had taken sick and stopped taking food.

“The girl had been tying rakhis on the three-year-old cat for the past three years and looked upon it as her brother. After the cat fell ill two days ago, she stayed by its side taking as much care of it as possible. She had called a veterinary doctor this morning to check on the cat. The doctor administered two injections to the cat and asked us give it some medicines,” said one of the shocked family members.

The girl had given the animal the medicines the doctor had prescribed, but they failed to have any effect on the cat, which died around 9.30 in the morning. Priyambada appeared traumatised by the cat’s death and did not allow her parents to bury the animal.

“I thought that after a while she would allow us to throw the carcass away and I went out to drop my eldest daughter to her college in the city. But within an hour, I got a call from my wife that Priyambada had hanged herself from the ceiling fan in her bedroom with her dupatta,” said Pratap. He said she had been the third among his four children.

Though her mother, brother and sister were at home, they came to know about her suicide later as she had done the deed when no one was around. When her mother opened the door of her bedroom, she found Priyambada’s body hanging from the fan. The cat’s body was lying on the floor with rakhis tied on it. “By the time her mother found her, she had already died. With the help of the neighbours, her body was brought down,” said her father.

Khandagiri police sent the body to Capital Hospital for post-mortem.

Pratap said there were three other cats in his house, but Priyambada had been most attached to this particular cat. “We had never thought of her love for the animal would kill her,” said a relative of the deceased who had come to the hospital to receive the body after post-mortem. He said they would cremate the dead cat along with the girl.