Another horrific case of rape and murder was reported from the Mahishmari village in South 24 Parganas district. An 11-year-old school girl was abducted, raped and murdered late on Friday night, sources said. Following this, police and villagers fought pitched battles on Saturday, leaving several people injured.
The girl was allegedly picked up from around the house of the local village Pradhan, brutalised and killed. The body of the victim was found at the banks of the Hooghly River on Saturday morning leading to mass outrage. The accused was arrested early on Saturday, police said.
The villagers reacted after the village Pradhan refused to share the CCTV footage from outside his house, locals said, adding the “angry villagers then got suspicious and hundreds of them attacked and set the Kripakhali police outpost afire. They alleged that the minor, who was missing since October 4 and that police did not act on their complaint immediately.
Following this the police resorted to heavy lathi-charge and bursting tear gas shells to disperse the crowd, sources said adding several men were injured during the clash. The Friday incident takes place amid an ongoing protests in the RG Kar Medical College rape and murder case that took place on August 9.
“The police are taking sides of the miscreants,” locals said, alleging that “a cousin of the victim had in fact been raped a few years ago and the police did nothing in that case leading to the girl to commit suicide then.”
District SP PC Dhali said, “we have arrested the culprit within six hours of the victim being abducted,” adding that the villagers’ allegations of lax handling of the case were unfounded.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Left leaders who reached Mahishmari on Saturday blocked the van carrying the body of the victim for postmortem. According to CPI(M) leader Meenakshi Mukherjee, this was done “so that an RG Kar like incident, where the body was hurriedly sent for funeral after a fake postmortem to save some big fishe can be prevented.”
Meanwhile, BJP MLA Agnimitra Paul had heated exchanges with local Trinamool Congress MP Pratima Mondal even as the villagers raised “go-back” slogans against her. “The victim bore injury marks similar to that of Abhaya in RG Kar Medical College”, the BJP MLA said. While Paul raised the issue of RG Kar and Sandeshkhali to say that “the law and order of Bengal has completely collapsed,” Mondal resorted to counter-sloganeering and cited the instances of Hathras and Unnao.
Even as the police were forced by the Opposition parties to bring the body of the victim to Kolkata Police morgue, commotion started afresh in the evening. The police resorting to lathi charge in which some Left activists and media personnel were injured.
Saturday’s incident takes place in the midst of the RG Kar protest where the junior doctors who ended their cease work late on Friday night started a sit-in demonstration at Esplanade in Kolkata giving a 24-hours’ ultimatum to the State Government warning, “if the Government does not concede to our demands by removing the health secretaries and sprucing up the security infrastructure we will be forced to go for an indefinite hunger strike.”
