A four-year-old girl was abducted, gang-raped and abandoned in a serious condition by two people in Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district on Sunday night, said police.
The accused threw her into bushes thinking the girl was dead, but she was found alive in a serious condition on Monday evening. Police arrested a waiter Rajkumar Singh, 24, a resident of Khargone while another accused Dileep is still at large.
“The girl had come to her paternal aunt’s home to celebrate Diwali. The aunt lives in a semi-kutcha house in the farm of the village. On Sunday night, she slept with her cousin but found missing on Monday morning,” said Khandwa superintendent of police (SP), Vivek Singh.
The family filed a missing complaint and informed that Rajkumar, who worked as a waiter, also had also been missing since Monday morning. The family informed that Rajkumar had come to the aunt’s home and asked for a cot on Sunday night. He took the cot and slept at least 100 metre away from the house.
“On Monday, when the family members started searching for the girl, they didn’t find Rajkumar as well. Police nabbed him from a neighbouring village and during interrogation, he confessed that he along with his relative Dileep abducted the girl from the house and raped her in intoxicated state. He said they strangulated her to death and threw the body in bushes of the farm, 1.5 km away from the house,” the SP added.
Police team started a search operation and found the girl alive. She was rushed to district hospital from where she was referred to MY Hospital Indore in serious condition.
A first information report (FIR) has been registered under Section 376 (d) (gangrape) and 363 (kidnapping) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and under relevant sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offence (POCSO) Act. Police are trying to nab Dileep.
(With inputs from Sunil Kerhalkar from Khandwa)
