3-yr-old kidnapped, beheaded by repeat offender weeks after release from jail

A 37-year-old man allegedly raped and beheaded a three-year-old girl in Jharkhand’s Jamshedpur weeks after he was released after serving a prison term for abducting another child, investigators said on Wednesday.

Government railway police deputy superintendent Noor Mustafa Ansari said they recovered the girl’s headless body from some bushes near a water treatment plant in Ramadhin Bagan area. He added Rinku Sahu, the accused, had dumped the body there on Friday after allegedly abducting her from the city’s Tatanagar railway station on Thursday last.

“We arrested Sahu on Tuesday night following a tip-off after we shared CCTV footage of the abduction with the media and on social media. He led us to the place where he had dumped the body,” he said. “The girl’s private parts have also been damaged, indicating rape. We are awaiting her post-mortem report to conclusively confirm that,” Ansari said.

Police superintendent Ehtesham Waquarib said they were investigating Sahu and his accomplice Kailash Kumar’s link with Md Seikh alias Monu Mandal, who had brought the three-year-old girl and her mother to Jamshedpur from West Bengal’s Purulia on Thursday.

The 26-year-old mother returned to Jamshedpur from Purulia on Wednesday for identifying the body. But she could not do so as she kept fainting frequently after seeing the corpse. Ansari said the mother of the victim had eloped with Mandal from her village.

“Mandal was arrested on the basis of the compliant the girl’s mother lodged on July 26 accusing him of abducting her daughter in connivance with his unknown friends…” Ansari said.

Sahu and Kumar have confessed to having abducted the three-year-old from the railway station while she was sleeping next to her mother and Mandal near a ticket counter, according to Ansari.

The two were caught on CCTV cameras installed at the railway station abducting the girl, the police said. The footage was shared and it helped the police to locate the accused.

Ansari said they have found Sahu has had a history of similar crimes. He added Sahu was sentenced to two-year imprisonment for abducting a sevenyear-old child with an intention to kill in Jamshedpur on April 18, 2015.

“A local court convicted and sentenced him to two-year jail term in March 2018… He came out of jail a few weeks ago,” said Ansari.

The police had a tough time protecting Sahu and Kumar from angry residents of Ramadhin Bagan, who tried to attack them following the recovery of the headless body, said Ansari. He added even on Wednesday people surrounded their vehicles and demanded that Sahu be handed over to them when they went to the murder scene with a dog squad to trace the severed head.

Ansari said Sahu has been insisting he did not behead the girl even as he admitted to killing her when she started crying as he was raping her.

An Ansari-led team was looking for the girl’s severed head on Wednesday, while her torso was sent for post mortem. “We pressed the sniffer dog squad to trace the head but so far to no avail,” said Ansari.

Ansari said Sahu’s mother is a policewoman while Kumar’s father is a Central Reserve Police Force trooper posted in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama.