Police have arrested a man in an encounter for allegedly sexually assaulting an 11-year-old Dalit girl who is speech-and-hearing impaired in Rampur district of Uttar Pradesh..
They said the 24-year-old accused suffered a bullet injury to his leg.
The police said that the victim had multiple injury marks on her body and signs of burn injuries on her private parts allegedly caused by smouldering cigarette butts.
“There is a possibility that she must have been raped by one more person as there are numerous injuries on her body and private parts.
Her face was swollen, indicating that it had been struck by a heavy object. She is terrified and unable to explain her nightmare,” said the doctor who examined the girl.
According to the police, the girl was attacked after she had gone out along with her elder sister to bring cow dung on Tuesday evening.
She usually remains outside the house during the daytime. But when she did not come home even late at night, we started searching for her, said the family.
We made an announcement about the missing of our daughter from the loudspeaker of a mosque at night, but to no avail,” the girl’s mother stated in the First Information Report (FIR).
The police had formed three teams after being informed by residents that a villager had spotted the girl lying unconscious and naked with injury marks on her body.
Police said they scanned the CCTV footage and in one of the clips the accused was seen accompanying the girl to a desolate place where she was raped. We identified the accused, and when the police team tried to trap him, he opened fire, forcing the police to retaliate with the firing.
He has been injured and admitted to the local hospital under police custody,” said Vidyasagar Mishra, the Superintendent of Police (SP), Rampur.
The criminal history of the arrested man is also being searched to determine if he has committed such crimes earlier.
The police said they first took the girl to the primary health centre and later to the Meerut district hospital on Wednesday night.