Pelhar murder: Teen strangled 8-year-old after moms squabbled for space

Mumbai: A 16-year-old boy, the main accused in the murder of an eight-year-old girl next door in Pelhar, is accused of strangling the victim to subdue after he called her in his house

Mumbai: A 16-year-old boy, the main accused in the murder of an eight-year-old girl next door in Pelhar, is accused of strangling the victim to subdue after he called her in his house. The police are verifying if her tried to rape her.

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According to the police, the girl’s postmortem report is not clear about rape, but they are trying to verify the facts on the aspect of suspected sexual assault by questioning the boy.

On Wednesday, the boy was detained in Jalna and brought to Mumbai on Thursday by the Pelhar police and was handed over to the Child Welfare Committee.

The police on Thursday also arrested the boy’s mother for allegedly helping her husband and their son in the disposal of the deceased’s body, which was found in an adjoining vacant room, in a bid to destroy the crime’s evidence.

The boy’s father, Rameshwar Sudhakar Karale, 44, had earlier been arrested on the same charge under section 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of an offence or giving false information to screen offender) of the Indian Penal Code.

The police are also looking into the suspected bad blood or vengeance between the two families. According to police officials, on November 30, the mothers of the victim and accused fought over the usage of space outside their rooms in Chawl Vanyacha Pada in Pelhar, Vasai East.

The girl, who was with her mother at the time, had allegedly teased the accused about the fight, after which the boy decided to teach her a lesson.

On December 1, after the girl returned from school, she changed her clothes and left for the ice cream shop. On her way back at 2.30pm, the accused called her to his house to help him switch on the gas and make tea since his parents and elder sister were at work.

During questioning, the boy said that he strangled her from behind when she went to the kitchen to ignite the gas to subdue her to rape her. The girl, however, fought back after which the accused beat her up and tied her legs with a rope, resulting in her death.

At 7pm when the boy’s parents came back and saw the body, they tried to cover his crime and put the body in a gunny bag and left it in their house before joining the search party of their neighbours and police to look for the girl at 10pm.

The family wanted to bury the girl in their vacant next room which had already been checked by the search party. “There was too much chaos in the chawl in an attempt to search for the girl that Karale’s family did not get time to dig a hole and bury her,” said Suhas Bawche, deputy commissioner of police (zone 3) Mira-Bhayander-Vasai-Virar police.

The officials said that the Karale family left the gunny bag in the vacant flat between 3 and 4am on December 4 due to the stench of the body’s decomposition.

At 1pm on December 4, when the stench spread, the police and the locals opened the vacant room and found the girl’s partially decomposed body.

The police team broke open the door of the room, and the accused, who was also a part of the search party, fled from the area and went to Dadar by train. From there he took another train to Thane and then an ST bus to Ghodge Phata. “From there, he went to Jalna, where his maternal uncle stays,” said a crime branch officer.