16-year-old detained in connection with murder of 8-year-old girl

Mumbai: The Pelhar police have detained a 16-year-old boy who was an accomplice in the murder of an eight-year-old girl, Chandani Saha

Mumbai: The Pelhar police have detained a 16-year-old boy who was an accomplice in the murder of an eight-year-old girl, Chandani Saha. The girl’s body was discovered inside a vacant house near the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Highway in Vasai (east) on Monday evening. She had been reported missing since Saturday evening.

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According to the police, Saha returned from school on Saturday, changed her uniform, and went to a nearby shop to buy ice cream. However, she never returned home, prompting her father, who is a mechanic, to look for her. Concerned when she wasn’t found by late Saturday, her parents approached the Pelhar police and filed a kidnapping case.

Saha stayed with her parents and siblings at Vanyacha Pada in Vasai (east). The police officers said, the locals and the police had been looking for the girl, “We checked all the houses in the vicinity but did not find her, however at 4pm on Monday we found her body in a room near her house which had already been checked earlier,” said a police officer from Pelhar police station.

Suhas Bawche, deputy police commissioner of Pelhar said that the suspect helped the main accused to dispose off the body in a room which had been vacated a few days ago, “The suspect and the main accused have assulted the girl due to which she has died. There are bruises all over her body suggesting that she was beaten up,” said Bawche.

While the motive behind the abduction remains unclear, the police emphasised that there was no evidence of sexual assault. The postmortem report is awaited for confirmation. Police suspect that the girl was killed on the same day she was kidnapped elsewhere, and her body was later dumped by the boys, showing signs of partial decomposition.

The parents identified the victim’s body through her clothes, leading to the registration of a murder case. The search for the main accused, a class nine student, is currently underway. In a separate incident, a 12-year-old girl reported missing from the same locality on Monday, however, she was successfully traced and reunited with her parents on Tuesday.