MEERUT: A 40-year-old man was arrested for allegedly strangling his 14-year-old daughter to death and dumping her in a canal in Bulandshahr’s Anupshahr area after she took Rs 500 for pocket money without permission, an act which he termed as ‘stealing.‘Police said that the Class VII student’s body was found floating in a canal on Friday evening. She was in school uniform.SP (rural) Tejveer Singh said, “The body was sent for postmortem. Prompt steps were taken to identify her, and her father, Ajay Sharma, was later held. During interrogation, Sharma, a small-time farmer, confessed that when he went to pick her from school at lunchtime on Thursday, instead of going home, he took her to his farm. There, he strangled her with a scarf and dumped the body in a canal.”“Sharma told the cops that he was angry with his daughter after she ‘stole’ Rs 500 from the money kept at home,” Singh added. An FIR was registered against Sharma under BNS sections of “murder” and “causing disappearance of evidence”.Still in shock, the girl’s mother, Suman Devi, said Sharma had misled her by claiming that he left their daughter at a relative’s place for studies. “The next day, a neighbour informed me that my daughter’s body was fished out from a nearby canal… After confronting him, my husband claimed that our daughter had stolen money on previous occasions too and that ‘he would soon send me where he had sent her’. I could never think that he could do this to our child,” Suman added. The 14-year-old was the eldest among four siblings.