Semi-clad minor girl found dead in Mahim

MUMBAI: A four-year-old minor girl’s was found in a semi-clad state at Mahim on Thursday morning. The girl was reportedly missing from the wee hours of Thursday morning and hours later, her body was found behind a car in Mahim. The minor is suspected to have been raped before being strangled to death, the police said. Mahim police have registered a case of kidnapping and further investigation is underway. According to the police, the minor girl was a daughter of a homeless couple and lived on the footpath, below Razzak Manzil building, near Mahim police station. At around 4am, when the minor girl went missing from the spot where she was tucked in by her parents. They soon began searching for her frantically. However, after three-hour search proved futile, they approached the police. Acting on the complaint, Mahim police registered a case of kidnapping against unknown persons and alerted all the wireless patrolling vehicles in the vicinity about the incident. Two hours later, the police received a phone call claiming to have found a girl’s body in a semi-clad state, on a footpath behind a car. A senior police official said, “The watchman of an adjoining residential building saw the girl’s body lying below the bushes, behind a parked car. He informed the secretary of the building immediately, who later alerted us." The police have booked an unidentified accused under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code pertaining to kidnapping (section 363) and murder (section 302). Preliminary examination of the body highlighted the girl was sexually assaulted and then strangled to death. A forensic team along with the dog squad later carried out necessary investigations from the spot and collected samples from for more analysis. The girl’s body was rushed to the civic-run Sion hospital to conduct a postmortem. Along with the local police team, the crime branch officials are also conducting a parallel investigation in this matter. A senior official said they are scrutinising CCTV footage from cameras of all the adjoining areas. "The footage is being scrutinised. In fact, the CCTV footage collected from The Living Room store shows a man carrying the girl on his shoulder at 3.30am and we are investigating the identity of this man and the entire case from all angles.”