The accused has confessed to the crime, said police.
Thiruvananthapuram:
A five-year-old girl was sexually assaulted and strangled to death by a migrant worker in Kerala’s Ernakulam district. The accused dumped her body in a sack on Friday and confessed to the crime a day later, cops said.
The accused was arrested Friday night but retrieving information from him took hours since he was in an inebriated state, said police even as search operations continued overnight.
The daughter of a couple from Bihar went missing Friday evening after she was seen being taken away by the accused in a CCTV footage.
“In the CCTV footage, we found Asfaq Aslam, who is from Bihar, taking the child with him. We took him into custody at 9.30 pm. He was not in a conscious state so we waited for a while and then interrogated him the entire night,” said Ernakulam (rural) SP Vivek Kumar.
The accused confessed to the crime on Saturday morning and showed where he had taken the child, said the Superintendent of Police.
The accused lived in the same building as that of the girl, said police, adding that she was brutally assaulted. He used garbage and sacks to cover her body after dumping it in a marshy area, added the police.
The migrant worker was arrested based on the CCTV footage but interrogation was delayed as he was intoxicated.
Besides, another person had spotted the girl with the accused in a nearby market area and informed the cops about it after seeing a missing post on Facebook. “I had asked him about the child. He said she was his daughter and he was going behind the market to get her a juice,” the man had told the police.
Following this, the area behind the market was searched.
Meanwhile, as the search operation gained momentum through the night, social media too was flooded with information to help trace her.
The Kerala police today apologised to the girl’s family on social media for failing to reunite her with them. However, the state police chief has rejected the opposition charges of lapses on behalf of the investigators.
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