Cuttack, March 27: Police today rescued a minor girl, who was allegedly kidnapped and raped, from Bhubaneswar, seven days after the arrest of the four persons involved in the crime.

The police today arrested another accused, Dhirendra Rout, 20, for his alleged involvement in the crime.

The whereabouts of the victim, a Class VIII dropout from Bisnabara within Badambadi police limits, was not known since she was allegedly kidnapped last November. "We rescued the girl after tracing her to the house of one Sk Salim at Samantarapur this afternoon," said Cuttack deputy commissioner of police Sanjeev Arora.

"She was undergoing training in a private tailoring shop, owned by Salim's wife Anjuma Akhtar, for the past three months," he said.

The victim had told the cops that she was staying with a cousin at Khapuria in Cuttack after the incident. She was looking for a job when she met Anjuma.

Her statement will be recorded before a magistrate tomorrow.

The cops arrested the four accused on March 20, two days after Badambadi police had received a mobile footage of the victim being sexually assaulted. They took the accused on remand on March 24 for further probe. The cops received information on the girl's whereabouts during the course of interrogation.

According to the case report, the four accused had raped the girl after one of them had kidnapped her "by deceitful inducement following his love affairs with her". The prime accused, 19-year-old Jaya Nayak, had kidnapped the girl on November 1 last year and taken her to his father's house at Bhagara. The police said investigations had revealed that he maintained a physical relationship with her. During her stay, two other accused - Jaya's elder brother Prasanta, 20, and paternal uncle Bidyadhar Nayak, 30, sexually assaulted the girl.

Another accused, Prasanta's friend, Ranjan Kumar Sahoo, 19, also raped the girl in an abandoned house near the Cuttack-Dhenkanal Road. Prasanta captured the act on his mobile. Prasanta showed the video footage to the victim's brother-in-law and handed him a copy of the memory card containing the footage, the police said. Three days later on March 18, a complaint was lodged with Badambadi police.

The police had seized three mobile phones and memory cards containing obscene visuals of Ranjan with the victim during the arrest.