3-year-old killed after rape, torture

Bhopal: In a gruesome and heart wrenching incident, a three-year-old girl was brutally raped, bitten all over her body, subjected barbaric torture and then murdered in a Madhya Pradesh village, police said on Sunday.

The mutilated body of the child was found around two km away from her home in the village of Mohad in Burhanpur district late on Saturday evening, police said.

“There were bite marks all over the body. Her left hand had been hacked off. The body was infested by maggots. Injury marks in the neck suggested that she might have been strangulated to death. The short postmortem report also indicated that she was sexually assaulted,” doctors who conducted autopsy on the body said.

“The body is at least four days old,” local civil surgeon Shakil Khan said.

According to the police, the victim had gone missing in the evening of August 15 when she was relieving herself near a drain a few feet from her home.

She was playing with her granny in the veranda of her house. She later told her grandma she would go outside to relieve herself.

Her grandmother had raised an alarm when she came out of house five minutes later and could not find her. Later, the victim’s family members filed a missing complaint with the local police.

The police launched a search for her and even used sniffer dogs for the purpose, but failed to locate her, a senior district police officer said.