Schoolgirl who went missing 12 days ago in Delhi found dead, one held

Police said the girl was in school uniform and was identified by her family members with the help of her school bag and water bottle that were found near the body inside the godown.

The decomposed body of an 11-year-old schoolgirl, who went missing on February 9 after she left her Nangloi home for a government school, was found in an abandoned semi-constructed godown in Ghevra area on Tuesday, 12 days after she was allegedly kidnapped and murdered by a 21-year-old man, police said on Wednesday, adding they had arrested the suspect

The suspect confessed to the crime and led the police to the abandoned godown in Ghevra, where the body of the girl was found in a highly decomposed condition. (Representative image/iStockphoto)

Police said the girl was in school uniform and was identified by her family members with the help of her school bag and water bottle that were found near the body inside the godown.

Senior police officers suspect that the man, identified as Rohit alias Vinod, may have killed the girl, a Class 6 student, after sexually assaulting her to ensure he was not arrested for the crime. However, they are waiting for her autopsy report to confirm the sexual assault. Although Rohit confessed that he strangled the girl, her autopsy report will help ascertain the exact cause of death, the officers said.

“We are interrogating Rohit and trying to establish why he killed the girl. All possible angles are being probed,” said deputy commissioner of police (outer) Harendra Kumar Singh.

Police said Rohit met the girl on February 9 for the first time at a park close to the school. She had bunked school. He befriended the girl by telling her that he was also a student at a nearby school and had bunked his classes. He lured her for a walk along the nearby railway tracks, after a security guard at the park had asked her why she was at the park and not in school. The guard had also clicked her photograph on his cellphone and warned her that he would send it to the school administration or her family, a senior police officer aware of the incident said.

DCP Singh said that on February 9, the girl’s mother approached the Nangloi police station and filed a complaint regarding the disappearance of her daughter. The woman told the police that her daughter had left for school in the morning but did not return. Initially, the family looked for the girl but when they could not locate her till late in the evening, they filed a complaint.

“We registered a case of kidnapping after receiving the missing complaint regarding a minor girl. Multiple teams were formed to find her,” said Singh, adding that the girl’s family belongs to Sidharth Nagar district in Uttar Pradesh.

During the probe, investigators collected information through technical and manual surveillance and found that the girl’s mother received a missed call from an unknown number on the day she went missing. Police collected and examined the details of the phone number. They found that its location was around the school. Investigators zeroed in on the phone number because it had been switched off since the day the girl went missing.

“The cellphone was switched on a few times but its location was first recorded in Punjab’s Ludhiana and again in Madhya Pradesh. Suspecting that Rohit may have taken the girl to these places, we sent our teams there but did not find either him or the girl. Our teams conducted raids at other places in Delhi-NCR as well, but to no avail,” the senior officer said.

On February 21 (Tuesday), through manual intelligence gathering, Rohit was caught in the Peeragarhi area and interrogated. He confessed to the crime and led the police to the abandoned godown in Ghevra, where the body of the girl was found in a highly decomposed condition. The body parts were collected in four boxes and sent to a government hospital’s mortuary for autopsy. The godown, nearly 5km away from the park where Rohit met and befriended the girl, was inspected by forensic experts, the officer said.

On Wednesday, the body of the girl was taken to a cremation ground in Nangloi and cremated amid tight security in the presence of her family, the police said.

Some locals, however, alleged that the police tried to hush up the matter and showed urgency in cremating the girl’s body.

“The police took advantage of the grief of the girl’s family and immediately cremated the body. Her family was taken to the crematorium in a police van and nobody else was allowed to enter. We suspect that the arrested man is part of a human trafficking gang and that is why police are trying to hush up the matter,” said Pawan Lakra, who lives in the girl’s neighbourhood.

DCP Singh, however, refuted the allegations and said, “It’s not a case of human trafficking. We have not found any previous involvement of the arrested man. We cremated the girl’s body with the consent of her family.”