UP: 8-year-old girl strangled to death, police suspect rape

In a horrifying incident reported from Uttar Pradesh, a 8-year-old girl was strangulated to death on Sunday. The girl’s dead body was recovered from a sugercane field in Kheri district, about 130 km from capital Lucknow, hours after she went missing.

In the case, the cops have now included rape charges, and POCSO Act (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act) on the basis of the injuries found on victim’s body.

The victim was allegedly strangulated with the clothes she was wearing, police said. So far, no one has been arrested in the case.

According to locals in the area, the girl had gone outside on Sunday with her grandmother in order to graze goat in the field.

By afternoon, she said she was going home. When she didn’t reach home by evening, the family started searching for the girl.

"She told me she was tired and wanted to go home. So I told her 'you go home I will graze the goats'. I brought the goats in the evening. We then realised she never reached home. Then, we thought she may have gone to attend a local wedding. But we did not even find her there. Later, her body was found. Her legs were tied and there was a lot of blood all over," the victim's grandmother said.

The victim’s father, a migrant worker, is not in Uttar Pradesh right now. The girl was also the eldest among the three siblings.

Vijay Dhull, Kheri's police chief, said in a statement, "A postmortem was conducted by a panel of eight doctors. The cause of the death has been determined to be 'asphyxiation due to antemortem strangulation'. The postmortem panel has not found any confirmation of rape but because of the nature of injuries on the body of the girl, we are invoking the rape charges and the POCSO Act in the case".

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