10-Year-Old Raped, Killed In Birbhum Village

Birbhum:  A 10-year-old girl was allegedly raped and murdered at a village in Birbhum’s Tarapith area.

The girl’s body was found in pool of blood yesterday morning near her house, the police said. Her family members claimed the girl was picked up by the alleged accused in the darkness while she was sleeping in a small room of their thatched house along with her brother and grandmother. Her parents were in an adjacent room, the police said.

The victim’s grandmother told the police that at around 11 PM yesterday she found her granddaughter was missing and raised an alarm. At dawn, the body was found in a field near a thatched shade used to cover submersible pump.

The family members, along with villagers, began to look for the girl. Around 3 AM, her semi-nude body was found at a distance of nearly 1 km from her residence, inside a hut in a farmland. According to eyewitnesses, while the lower part of the body was covered with a sack, the girl had been gagged with hay.

The incident sparked tension in the area with villagers resisting the attempts by the police to take away the body. They demanded a CBI probe as well as the immediate arrest of the culprits.

The father of the victim, a daily wage earner, went on to lodge a complaint against unknown persons. “A few people have been detained for questioning. The postmortem examination report will shed light on the cause of death,” a district police officer said.

Kamal Bairagya, Sub-Divisional Police Officer, Rampurhat said, “The body of a minor girl has been found. We have got some significant clues and sniffer dogs have been pressed into the investigation. The exact cause of death will be confirmed only after post-mortem.”