The Gondia police in Maharashtra have arrested four minors in connection with the brutal rape and murder of a 12-year-old tribal student on April 19.
The four minors, who were friends and aged around 17 years old, were apprehended by Gondia police on Saturday.
Police are not ruling out the possibility of the four minors being involved in filming the sexual assault, which they allegedly deleted later to avoid detection.
On April 19, the victim, a class-6 student, had accompanied her parents to a relative’s wedding ceremony in Gotanpar village of Deori tehsil. Allegedly, she was abducted from there by an ‘unidentified person’. When the girl couldn’t be found, her parents initiated a search. The next day, the victim’s decomposed body was discovered in the Dhawalkhedi forest near Gotanpar village.
Authorities questioned nearly 150 suspects from the Maoist-hit Ganutola area before cracking the case. During the investigation, teams led by SP Nikhil Pingale and Addl SP Nityanand Jha discovered that many messages, posts, videos, and chats were deleted by young people in a specific area. The local crime branch team, led by Senior Inspector Dinesh Labde, also helped in the investigation, as per The Times Of India report.
According to police sources, the victim had been friendly with a male friend from her village for some time. One of the perpetrators had met the girl at a wedding celebration in their neighbourhood. He then requested her to accompany him on his bike to a location where her male friend was waiting. The girl rode on the back of his bike and met her male friend, who was accompanied by two others. The four of them then went to Dhawalkhedi forest, where they sexually assaulted her.
Police said that the minors are now accusing each other of coercing the girl into having sex, while maintaining their innocence. After multiple rounds of questioning, it’s suggested that the male friend initiated physical contact first, followed by the others, although this hasn’t been confirmed by the police. There are also suspicions that the minors may have filmed the assault.
Several posts and videos were discovered deleted from the perpetrators’ mobile phones, but these will be recovered through cyber forensics, according to a police officer involved in the investigation.
The police also revealed that the perpetrators turned violent when the girl started resisting and protesting against the assault.
“One of the accused hit her with a stone and pushed her down. She suffered a fall on the rock and sustained a fatal injury on the back of the head. The blood-smeared stone was found beside the body too,” the cop noted, adding villagers attempted to shield the perpetrators, despite witnessing the victim leaving with one of them.
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