State Editions

Protests over brutal Hisar rape snowball

| | Chandigarh | in Chandigarh

A six-year-old girl, who was raped and killed in Haryana’s Uklana area in Hisar, was cremated on Sunday, as the agitated locals protested over the gruesome crime.

The girl child was allegedly abducted from her home, which is part of a slum-dwellers area in Uklana, in the wee hours on Saturday. Her body was found after few hours at a distance from the place where she was living with her family.

“Some unidentified men had allegedly abducted the girl when she was sleeping with her sister and mother in their home in a slum area. The men then raped and killed her,” the police said. The doctors of Civil Hospital who conducted the post- mortem examination said that the accused inserted a wooden stick into the girl's private parts, which ruptured her intestine.

“When the body was handed over to us it was soaked in blood,” a kin of the girl told the mediapersons in Hisar.

Angered over the incident, the opposition parties, Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), Congress and the local residents demonstrated against the Manohar Lal Khattar led government, on the cremation ground.

Former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda while demanding an immediate arrest of the accused said that such barbaric incidents showed that law and order machinery in the state under the BJP government had collapsed.

Things have come to such a pass that children were neither safe in their schools nor at homes, Hooda said while talking to the mediapersons.

The barbaric incident was a chilling reminder of the December 16 gangrape case in Delhi in 2012 involving a young woman, he said.

Senior Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala alleged that the Khattar government is sleeping while incidents of rape and murder take place every other day.

Haryana BJP chief Subhash Barala and party's Hisar MLA Kamal Gupta and other leaders were also present at the cremation.

A case under various Sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) including murder, rape, kidnapping, besides, under the provisions of the POCSO Act has been registered. A Special Investigation Team (SIT) has also been formed to probe the incident. However, no arrest has been made in the case, said a police spokesman.

The police is checking CCTV footage of the area to gather clues, he said.

The incident came to light on Saturday morning when passersby noticed the body of the girl on a deserted street, the police said.

The victim’s family, who work as labourers, belong to the Sapera community hailing from Tohana town in Fatehabad district. They were living near railway lines in Uklana for the last couple of years.

Meanwhile, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) on Sunday condemned the incident and said that they were coordinating with the state police to arrest the culprit.

"NCPCR will make every effort to talk to the Haryana Police so that the culprit is caught, prosecuted and given maximum possible sentence," said NCPCR advisor Kulbir Krishnan while talking to the mediapersons.

Krishnan called the incident barbaric, adding he had never heard such thing before.