A 16-year-old school student was allegedly raped and subsequently murdered at Budhabigha village in Rohtas district on Wednesday night.

The girl, a Class X student of the government high school at Chap village in Rohtas, around 150km west of Patna, had gone missing around 9pm on Wednesday. Her body was recovered from a place behind her house three hours later. The family members apprehended that she had been raped before being killed.

Rohtas additional superintendent of police (ASP) Abhay Kumar Das rushed to the spot under the jurisdiction of Akaurigola police station and sent the body to sadar hospital for post-mortem. “Seven persons have been named as accused in the FIR lodged based on the statement of the father of the deceased,” Rohtas superintendent of police Vikas Burman said.

He said the post-mortem report was awaited. “The autopsy report will reveal if the girl was raped before her throat was slit with a sharp-edged weapon,” he said, adding that raids were on to apprehend the culprits.

The residents of the area told the police that the victim’s family had an old dispute with the accused, whose names figured in the FIR.

Akaurigola police station house officer (SHO) Narendra Singh said the victim’s relatives told the investigators that the girl had left the house for attending the call of nature around 9pm. “We suspected foul play when she did not return till midnight. She was later spotted lying in a pool of blood behind the building,” the SHO quoted the girl’s father as saying.

He added that preliminary investigation suggested that the incident was the fallout of an old enmity with Iden Ansari, a neighbour. “The two families are at loggerheads over a plot of land and often quarrel with each other,” SHO Singh said. The police have, however, so far failed to trace the weapon used for committing the crime. ASP Das said all the accused were absconding after the incident. “We have formed a special team to arrest the accused at the earliest,” he told The Telegraph by phone from Rohtas.

Sources said the Budhanbigha incident was the third of its kind in the district in the past six months. In all the incidents, the victims were killed after being raped. The police, however, claimed to have cracked all the three cases and booked the accused. In one of the cases, even chargesheet was made against the accused, an investigating officer said.