TN girl murdered; rape suspected
The gruesome death of a 13-year-old school girl in a village near Srivaikuntam in Tamil Nadu’s Tuticorin District under suspicious circumstances has sent shockwaves, triggered by suspicion that the victim could have been kidnapped and raped by some local miscreants.
The 7th class girl (name withheld as she is a minor) of a Government Girls’ Higher Secondary school near her Kilakulam village, did not return home from school on Thursday evening, prompting her family to lodge a complaint with the Police.
A massive search was mounted only to find the girl’s disfigured body in a thick bushy area near the Tathankulam railway station, Police said.
The girl’s neck was found to have been strangled with the “dupatta” she had been wearing at the time of the incident, besides blood stains noticed on her face and near her nose, sources said. The body has been sent for post-mortem to the Palayamkottai Hospital in neighbouring Tirunelveli District.
Tuticorin Superintendent of Police J Rajendran told Deccan Herald by the phone on Friday, “As of now we are treating the case only as murder of a girl.”
Only on receipt of the post-mortem report could anything be said about the rape or otherwise of the hapless victim.”
He added that the murder of the girl happened in an interior village. “We are hopeful of nabbing the culprits soon,” the SP said.
The shocking incident came to light a day after a Mahila Court in Coimbatore had awarded a triple life sentence, among other punishments, to a man found guilty of raping a 17-year-old girl, killing her and the victim’s mother at Somanthurai village near Pollachi in Coimbatore district four years ago.
Murugan, the accused in that case, was working in a poultry farm in July 2008, when, according to the Prosecution, he murdered a 38-year-old woman before raping and killing her daughter Selvi.
Mahila Court Judge M P Subramanian had said in his order that though it was a “rarest of rare case”, deserving no leniency, he was not imposing the death penalty on Murugan, considering the future of the latter’s four young children, and the accused person’s aged parents.
