MEERUT: Nine days after she went missing, a girl, 15, was found dead at a Noida hospital — gang-raped, smothered to death and her body abandoned. Her family has accused relatives, with whom she had earlier gone on a trip, for the crime. They had dumped her body at the hospital, they added, and then pressured the family to not take the case to the police to “avoid scandal”.
“On March 22 … around 7.30am, my daughter left for her (school) but did not return till late in the evening. When I went to the school, it was shut and she was nowhere to be found. Around 7pm, her brother’s in-laws came home and expressed their sympathies and asked us not to go to the police for fear of disrepute,” the girl’s father said in the complaint to the police. While they kept looking for the girl, her brother’s in-laws would keep visiting the family and reiterate that word must not get out.
“On March 31, around 1pm, we got a call saying her corpse was lying at a hospital in Noida. We got to know then she had been gang-raped and brutally murdered. When we went over the CCTV footage from the area, we saw a relative riding a bike (the one who had called them and asked them not to go to the police), my daughter in the middle, and another youth riding pillion.”
Police said the two men, the relative and the unidentified man, had dropped her body at the hospital — they had presumably carried the corpse on the bike — and slipped away. The doctors found her dead on arrival. The autopsy report said she had been “smothered” to death.
The family has named six members of the brother’s in-laws’ family in the complaint, on the basis of which an FIR has been filed against them and an unidentified person, the one on the bike. They have all been booked under the Pocso Act and for gang-rape, kidnapping and murder. “Three of them have been arrested. The main suspect (who was riding the bike) is on the run,” Hapur additional SP Sarvesh Mishra said.
(The victim's identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme court directives on cases related to sexual assault)