Chandigarh: A week after a six-year-old girl was found dead in a forest in Chandigarh, the police are awaiting her medical report to ascertain whether she was sexually assaulted.
The girl who lived with her parents and two siblings in Hallo Majra village went missing last Friday after she had gone out to play. Her body was found by the police the next day in a semi-naked state. A stone used to crush her head was also recovered from the crime scene.
The police arrested a 12-year-old boy Saturday afternoon (6 March) who lived in her neighborhood on the basis of a CCTV footage which showed the girl riding pillion on a bicycle being paddled by the boy Friday evening. The accused has been sent to a juvenile home.
The police suspect the boy sexually assaulted the girl before killing her.
“It seems that the boy had taken her to the forest area to rape her as her clothes were missing, but we are still not sure as the medical report is awaited,” Narinder Patial, Station House Officer, sector 31 police station, told ThePrint.
Patial added that the boy may have killed the girl in a state of panic.
The minor girl’s father, who works in a factory, told the police that she had gone to play with her friends after lunch. As she did not return home after 5 pm, the girl’s mother went out looking for her. When the girl’s father came home, he, along with neighbours, searched for her. On failing to find her, they informed the police.
The police registered a case of kidnapping and started a search operation in the village and forest area. They found the girl’s body at 8 am Saturday.
Student activists arrested
Meanwhile, at least three student activists were arrested last Saturday after they allegedly led a crowd of local residents to block the Chandigarh-Delhi highway, demanding justice for the victim.
The police claimed that during the blockade, the protesters pelted stones at them and disrupted traffic.
“We assured the protesters that the accused had been arrested but still they continued to agitate on the road and instigate the locals. They were demanding that the accused be brought before them on the highway so that they could mete out justice to him on the spot,” said Patial.
The students’ union bodies, however, rejected police’s claims.
“The people of the village were very extremely agitated because of the callous police response. They first blocked the highway. Upon hearing the news, activists of the city rushed to the spot and tried to manage the situation. After a couple of hours, when the police finally assured that the accused would be arrested the protesters decided to leave the highway. But the police started lathi charging them at which point some of the protesters pelted stones,” said Gurpreet Singh, president of Punjab Students Union (Lalkaar), a students’ union body, whose activist Amandeep Singh was arrested.
Other students who were arrested include Vaibhav Chhabra of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, a youth activist body, along with Gopal, a resident of Hallo Majra.
“Demanding justice for a rape victim has become a larger crime than rape itself. Without any concrete evidence, the three have been booked under the following sections 147, 149, 323, 332, 341 and 353 of the IPC. The youth have been assaulted in police custody. Further, their medical examination was also not conducted by the police. The FIR was registered on 6th March, but the police refused to produce a copy for the families of the arrested youth until 6pm on 9 March,” said Amandeep Kaur of Punjab Students Union (Lalkaar).
Also read: Dalit girl in Aligarh was ‘strangled, smothered, dragged, but no sign of sexual assault’