An enraged father strangled his 17-year-old daughter to death in her sleep in India when he found out she was pregnant after being raped in a report.

The girl, who was from Mantoli village in India’s northeastern Uttarakhand state, was murdered by her father to preserve the ‘family honour’, according to police, adding they suspect the girl had been raped.

They informed the father who later turned up at the grandparents’ house in a state of rage, but left shortly after. He returned to the house at five in the morning and strangled the girl as she slept.

Following the murder, the next morning the father told villagers that the teen had killed herself and that he’d already buried her. On Thursday, officers exhumed the body and interviewed the grandparents.

The brutal murder comes just two weeks after a 14-year-old girl who fought off two rapists were burned to death when her attackers became enraged at her resistance.

The middle school student was admitted to hospital in Raipur with burns covering 80 percent of her body. She told police the identities of her attackers on her deathbed.

Earlier last month, the raped body of a four-year-old girl was dumped in a well after she was raped and murdered in the same city of Chhatarpur.

In India, a rape is reported every 15 minutes, according to recently released official government crime data. Despite various federal government campaigns such as Beti Bachao Beti Padhao – Educate the daughter, Save the daughter – the crime rate per 100,000 women increased to 58.8% in 2018 in comparison with 57.9% in 2017.

According to recent government data, 32,500 cases of rape were registered with the police in 2017 – almost 90 per day. The National Crime Records Bureau on October 21, 2019, released its report for the year 2017, which stated that 359,849 cases of crime against women were reported in the country.