A 20-year-old man was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly raping and then brutally murdering a teenage girl with a sharp-edged blade in a village in Uttarakhand's Udham Singh Nagar district.
The accused Rajiv Kumar (20) was arrested within 12 hours of the incident in Amiyawala village of Jaspur area, Udham Singh Nagar's Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Manikant Mishra said.
Based on the information provided by the accused, the blood-stained blade used in the crime and the clothes he was wearing at the time of committing it have been recovered, he said.
Mishra said that the girl, a Class 8 student, had gone to the field on Tuesday evening to collect sugarcane peels for her animals, where Rajiv followed her.
The accused allegedly raped her first, and when she resisted, he crossed all limits of brutality.
He allegedly twisted her arm and broke it, choked her unconscious and then stabbed her multiple times in the face and abdomen with a sharp blade, leaving her bleeding.
The SSP said when the girl did not return home for a long time, her family began searching for her and found her lying in a pool of blood in a sugarcane field about 150 metres from her home.
The villagers informed police about the incident and rushed the girl to the Jaspur Community Health Centre, where doctors declared her dead.
Enraged by the incident, the villagers created a ruckus and blocked National Highway 74, demanding the immediate arrest of the accused.
Police forces from other police stations had to be called in to deal with the situation which had worsened due to the presence of a large crowd of villagers on the scene.
After much effort, the police persuaded the villagers to let them reopen the highway and restore traffic.
Based on the complaint filed by the mother of the deceased, a case was registered under Sections 103 (1) (punishment for murder) and 64 (1) (punishment for rape) of the BNS and the POCSO Act, and action was initiated.
The SSP said 10 teams were formed to solve the case. A sniffer dog was also used, which travelled from the crime scene to the home of the deceased and then to the home of the accused.
Rigorous interrogation by the police made the accused confess to the crime. He made an attempt initially to divert the case, the SSP said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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