New Delhi: A 19-year-old youth was arrested on Saturday for the alleged rape and murder of a minor girl whose body was found in a field in outer Delhi's Badli area.
The accused has been identified as Chander Bhukan, a native of Uttar Pradesh who worked at a brick kiln nearby. He was in an inebriated state at the night of the incident and the police suspect that he allegedly sexually assaulted the 8-year-old victim even after she was dead, a senior police official said.
According to police, the girl's body was found in the field in which her father was employed as an agriculture labourer. On the evening of Holi, three youths - Bhukan, Manoj and Nathan - came to the victim's house to celebrate the festival and consumed alcohol with the victim's father. The victim's father then went outside to bring his son back from a friend's place, while the girl and her mother went to sleep. After he returned, the father noticed that his daughter was missing from her makeshift bed outside the cottage, police said. Her body was found in the field, around 30 metres away from their cottage in the wee hours on Saturday, following which the father informed his employer who later called up police.
The police soon tracked down the three suspects and, Bhukan confessed to the crime, DCP (Outer) Vikramjit Singh said. During interrogation, Bhukan confessed that he raped the child and allegedly throttled her to death. Certain inconsistency in the accused's statement regarding the sequence of events later led investigators to suspect that he may have sexually assaulted the girl even after she was dead, an official said, adding that this can only be ascertained by the postmortem report which is awaited.
