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Video Editor: Purnendu Pritam
"The pictures were so difficult to look at. His face was completely disfigured, they had stabbed him in his stomach. To date, I've not seen my husband's dead body," said 25-year-old Chingneihmoi Zou, unable to control her tears as she spoke to The Quint at her house in Manipur's Churachandpur, standing in front of her deceased husband's remembrance banner.
Zou's husband, Thanghoulal, is one of the hundreds who have lost their lives in the violence between the Meiteis and Kukis that Manipur has witnessed over the past two months.
The Quint visited Thanghoulal's family in Churachandpur district and spoke to his wife about the brutal murder.
Holding her baby child, with her other young child standing next to her, Zou explained that the day after the tribal unity rally held on 3 May, Chief Minister Biren Singh had called for a meeting.
"I asked him why he had gone to the meeting when such meetings were dangerous. He replied that the CM had called the MLAs for the meeting, and he had to go. He also told me that he will call me once he gets back home. Then he hung up," Zou narrated.
Zou claimed that Thanghoulal's friends couldn't even give him immediate attention as they first took him to the police station first and then to the hospital.
Covering her face with the shawl that she was wearing, Zou said that her son still runs to the house's gate and asks when his father will come back.
"We can't even go and get my husband's dead body. None of us can go to Imphal. Doing so could cost us our own lives. I still haven't seen my husband's dead body. I don't know the state in which the body will be," Zou said, sobbing.
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