The ordeal of the father of the nine-year-old girl found raped and murdered in Kurla on Sunday is just coming to light. His story is one of police apathy even in the most heartrending of cases.
The grief-stricken father, Subodh, told DNA on Monday that it was not the Nehru Nagar police who informed him about his daughter’s death. It was only when a neighbour told him that a channel was airing news of a girl’s body being found on the terrace of a police residential building in Nehru Nagar that he went to the police station.
The girl, Rashmi, had gone missing on Saturday from near her residence in Hanuman Nagar, roughly a kilometre from Nehru Nagar.
“After searching for my daughter the whole night, I returned home at 8am. It was at 10.40am that my neighbour rushed to my place and then asked to check a piece of news being run on a channel,” Subodh said. The channel was running a ticker that a body of a nine-year-old girl had been found on the terrace of a police building.
“We had registered a missing person complaint with the Nehru Nagar police near midnight on Saturday, but they did not bother to inform us and took the body directly to the Rajawadi hospital.”
He said when he reached the hospital, he found that the body had been sent to the unclaimed bodies section.
Subodh’s cousin Rakesh said: “When we checked with hospital officials, they told us that the body had been sent to the JJ hospital. It took us more than an hour to see the body and identify it as Rashmi’s.”
Subodh’s relatives and neighbours said that when they went to the police station on Saturday night, the officers on duty told them that they should keep looking for Rashmi through the night as the police could act only in the morning.
“If only the police had acted early, my daughter could have been saved,” said Seema, Rashmi’s grieving mother.
(All names changed to protect identities)
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