JOIN USThe Gujarat Police on Friday claimed to have solved the mystery behind gory incident of attack, rape and murder of a 9-year-old unknown girl.
"The Gujarat police have arrested the key perpetrator of the crime from a village in Ganganagar of Rajasthan and is being brought to Gujarat for further investigations," Pradeepsinh Jadeja, minister of state for Home, Gujarat, told media persons.
On April 6, Surat Police found the dead body of a 9-year-old girl thrown in the bushes in the Pandesara area of Surat.
The girl was found to have over 86 wounds on her body, including on her private parts. The autopsy report also revealed that the girl was raped and tortured for days before being killed.
This had led to a public outcry, with industrialist Anand Mahindra venting his ire on social media, saying that he was willing to volunteer as an executioner for the " brutal rapists and murders of young girls".
Giving details of the police investigations, the home minister said that over 400 police personnel from the Surat Police and Ahmedabad Crime Branch had worked together to solve this complicated case.
"The police carried out the technical analysis of mobile data and CCTV footage collected from a 3 km radius of the place from where the body of the young girl was found. During investigations, they noticed a black car moving around suspiciously in the area and this led to cracking the case," he said.
The findings have also lifted the veil on the identity of the girl as well as perpetrators of the crime.
All of them are said to have origins in Rajasthan. Earlier, the police believed that the girl was from either Odisha, West Bengal or Jharkhand.
A man from Andhra Pradesh had come forward claiming that the victim was his daughter. The Surat police even carried out a DNA test to verify his claims.
"We have also found the decomposed body of a woman on April 9-10, lying a few kilometres away from where we found the dead body of the girl. We believe that she is the mother of this child and would carry out a DNA test to establish the blood relations," Jadeja said.
The police have already registered a case of rape and booked unidentified accused under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.
Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Vijay Rupani said that Surat Police had arrested three persons in connection with the case.
"We would be appointing a special prosecutor to fight the case and run the case in a fast-track court to speed up the process," Jadeja said.