Three-year-old raped, murdered in Surat

It’s been less than a year when a teenage girl was gangraped in Surat, and another tragedy has shaken the city. This time, the victim is a three-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped and later strangulated.

Her badly decomposed body was found from an abandoned house in Limbayat on Monday morning.

The girl, Deepmala Patel, a resident of Bajrang Nagar in Limbayat, went missing three days back; she was last spotted playing near her house.

Preliminary investigation has revealed that the girl was raped and later strangulated with a nylon thread. The girl’s parents lodged a missing complaint with the Limbayat police, but in vain.

It was only when some residents, following the foul smell emanating from the house, searched the place that they found the body, wrapped in a polythene bag that was tied to the door.

Deepmala’s father Ramesh identified the body on the basis of the clothes. Police rushed to the spot for investigation; the body was then sent to new civil hospital for forensic post-mortem. Statements of some of the people present at the spot were also recorded, but the police seemed clueless about the culprit till late in the evening. 

LB Jhala, inspector at Limbayat police station, suspects involvement of someone close to the family. “Deepmala’s family hail from Mirzapur. They came to Surat just a month back. They don’t know many people here. The way in which the crime was committed shows that the culprit had details of the victim,” Jhala said.