Kolkata: A nine-year-old was allegedly raped and murdered at Sundarbans in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district, leading to a violent mob pelting stones the police station on Tuesday, injuring the office-in-charge Kaushik Kundu.
The incident apparently happened last Saturday evening, when the girl went out to buy some ration for the family and did not return. Later in the night, a search by family members found her body rolled inside a bedsheet in a room of a local youth. The victim’s father lodged a police complain accusing the four members of the accused family.
Police arrested three of the accused today — the youth, his father and his sister-in-law, while his mother, the fourth accused, is absconding.
“We had been looking for them for the last two days and they were finally arrested from a nearby village. A case of rape and murder has been lodged against them,” said a police officer of the district.
However, trouble erupted when the accused was being taken to court as the local ransacked the police station and demanded that the accused be handed over to them. In this chaos, Kundu was injured and had to be hospitalised.
“It was a war like situation as hundreds of locals have surrounded the police station demanding that the accused be handed over to them. It would have been a mockery of justice if they had laid their hands on the accused. Our officer in his efforts to clam the mob was injured,” the police officer added.
Meanwhile, a political war has started where political parties have accused each other of the accused being their workers completely ignoring the primary issue of safety of women in this state.
“This is the not a solitary case of a girl be raped and murdered. Similar incidents had been reported from other districts as well. However, the administration has done little,” said Triloke Das, a social worker in the areas. A similar case of rape and murder a girl child was reported from Birbhum district earlier this January.
Sundarabans, known to the world from its mangrove forest and Royal Bengal Tigers, has also earned notoriety for flesh trade and girls being smuggled to other parts of the country and even abroad. “This is a major issue for a district with an international border. Every year hundreds of girls go missing and this has become a major social and political issue in the area,” Das added.
