An 8-year-old girl, who had gone to a friend's birthday party, was murdered after allegedly being raped by a man in Maharashtra's Palghar district, reported news agency PTI. The police have arrested a 21-year-old son of a former sarpanch (village head) in this connection.
The victim, a resident of a village in Mokhada taluka, went to the birthday party of her friend in the village on Sunday but did not return home. Her family members then carried out a search for her.
The victim's body was found near a graveyard in the village late Sunday night. The police sent the body for postmortem and initiated a probe into the girl's death, Mokhada police station's assistant inspector Premnath Dhole said. A police probe team worked on various leads, including technical and intelligence inputs, and arrested the man on Tuesday, he said.
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The man allegedly stalked the girl on Sunday and then raped and murdered her at night, he said. The mother of the accused was earlier a local councillor, as per the police.
The accused has been booked under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections 103(1) (murder), 65 (2) (rape of a female under 12 years of age) and 66 (punishment for causing death or resulting in a persistent vegetative state of the victim) and provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, Dhole said.