Patna, April 21: A 10-year-old girl with a speaking disability was strangulated to death allegedly by a group of men from the Patna Sahib railway station late last night.

The girl, whose home is in Gugri Jamalpur village in Khagaria, and her one-a-half-year-old brother were lured to an onion cultivation field in the Bypass police station by the men. Police suspect the girl was sexually assaulted after which she was murdered.

The post-mortem, conducted at the Nalanda Medical College Hospital, will confirm if the girl had been raped or sexually assaulted.

The girl’s infant brother was left near her lifeless body and it was only this morning that the police recovered him.

The incident has again brought to the fore the issue of safety of women in Patna and comes barely eight days after a teenage girl from Bengal was gangraped by a group of autodrivers in the state capital.

The place from where the body of the Khagaria girl was recovered today is close to the spot where the Bengal girl was assaulted.

The Khagaria girl’s mother had reached Patna Sahib railway station along with two other women yesterday morning to buy local cosmetics.

“We are poor people. We buy cosmetics from Patna City and then travel to different villages to sell them. We came here in the morning and went around the market for business. We returned to the station by 4pm as we had to catch the train to Khagaria,” the grieving mother told The Telegraph.

The women, along with the two children, were waiting on the platform. “I saw one youth playing with my son. He was listening to some songs on his mobile phone and my son was excited and he put it in his ears too. My daughter did the same. It was around 5.30pm then and the platform was crowded. I went to the bathroom around 6.30pm and came back after 10 minutes to find my children missing. I asked my companions but they hadn’t noticed anything because of the crowd,” she said.

The three women began a frantic search for the children in and around the station.

“Our search continued for more than an hour. But they couldn’t be found anywhere. We came back to the station premises and went to the Government Railway Police who lodged a missing persons diary and also made a public announcement about my children. I sat through the night hoping for their return,” she said.

The Bypass police station, in the course of patrolling, recovered the body of the girl from the field located in the Karmali Chak area this morning. “The baby was sitting next to the body, crying. It was shocking,” a police officer at the Bypass police station said.