5-yr-old found dead was tortured with cigarettes, head crushed and arm chopped off

Jharkhand police on Thursday detained four people including the step father of a five-year-old girl a day after her body was found with cigarette burns, her head crushed and left arm chopped off.

The autopsy conducted on Thursday confirmed abrasion marks on the neck, the head crushed with stones and her body having marks of several cigarette burns, said a police officer.

Dr M Tamil Vanan, Jamshedpur’s senior superintendent of police (SSP), said they were waiting for the final post mortem report, which will also indicate whether the girl was raped or not.

The police had recovered the badly mutilated body of the girl from Subarnarekha river bank on Wednesday morning in Jamshedpur’s Sonari area. The girl had gone missing from her house Monday evening.

Vanan said the girl’s stepfather Supriyo Ghosh and his three friends have been detained apart from 10-12 other people.

“We have interrogated about 25 people so far. We are confident of solving the case and arrest the accused by late tonight or tomorrow. We are awaiting the post mortem report to conclusively confirm if the victim was raped before murder,” he said.

Ghosh, who had married the victim’s mother two years ago, however, has denied his involvement in the gruesome murder stating he had dropped the girl at her house in Kapali basti on Monday evening after taking her to Sonari market, police said.

A medical board conducted the post mortem on Thursday following an order of Jamshedpur deputy commissioner Suraj Kumar.

Meanwhile, an angry crowd from Kapali basti led by a local Congress leader, Usha Yadav, staged a protest at Sonari police station and blocked the road with the body of the victim, demanding that the accused be handed over to them for ‘public justice.’ The police deployed the quick response team (QRT) in the area to disperse the crowd.