A 10-year-old girl was allegedly kidnapped while sleeping beside her family on a pavement, raped and murdered in south Delhi’s Mehrauli, police sources said on Tuesday.
The incident has reignited concerns over women’s safety in the national capital, which has been ranked India’s most unsafe metro city for women, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data.
The accused, an app cab driver, dumped her body in a forested stretch along the Faridabad-Gurgaon road in an attempt to conceal the crime. He was arrested within six hours of the incident, a police officer said.
The incident came to light after the family, who lived on a footpath, contacted the police after failing to find the girl in the early hours of Monday. A police team reached the spot and scanned footage from hundreds of CCTV cameras in the area. The accused, identified as 25-year-old Bablu, was arrested within six hours.
“The accused, a cab driver in his early 30s and a native of Bihar, abducted the girl around 5am when she was asleep with her family. A case of kidnapping was registered immediately, and a large-scale search operation was launched. While checking CCTV footage, the police got to know about the cab driver,” a police officer said.
A probe revealed that the victim’s family, from Bihar, used to live on the pavement near CDR Chowk in Mehrauli. The victim sold balloons, and her parents are daily-wage labourers. They have three more children.
“After committing the crime, the accused was seen returning to the same location, but fled after watching police teams nearby. Teams tracked his movements, and he was arrested within six hours after the crime,” an officer of Mehrauli police station said.
According to him, technical surveillance and CCTV analysis played a crucial role in solving the case swiftly. During interrogation, the accused confessed to abducting the minor, sexually assaulting her and strangling her to death.