Panaji, Feb 3 (IANS) Less than three weeks after a paedophile lured a seven-year-old girl to a Goa school toilet and raped her, another paedophile has been arrested for molesting over several months four minor girls from Margao, police said Sunday.
Vangappa Yallapa Kundri, a 33-year-old labourer from Gokak in Karnataka, was arrested late Saturday. The Goa Police are also probing whether he had been involved in other molestation incidents in the state.
“The girls said that he used to offer them chocolates while they would be on their way to school or back, and take them to secluded areas to molest them,” investigating official Vincy Paes told IANS.
According to the victims, all in the age group of 7 to 11 years, Kundri used to stalk them near a railway over-bridge near the Margao railway station, about 30 km from here.
An eight-year-old victim told the police that sometimes they felt drowsy after eating the chocolates and the accused would take them to nearby bushes, take their uniforms off and molest them.
Auda Viegas, a social activist who has been interacting with the victims, said Kundri had been molesting the girls since September last year.
“All the girls say that he has been molesting them for months now. They did not have courage to report the incident to police,” Viegas said.
The police are awaiting the medical report to ascertain whether the girls were also raped by the accused.
Last month, the brutal rape of a seven-year-old girl in a school run by a public sector undertaking in the port town of Vasco, some 35 km from here, had shocked the state.
The accused, who is still absconding, also used chocolates to lure the girl to the school toilet where he raped her.
The school headmistress has been arrested for trying to cover up the incident by washing the victim’s private parts and cleaning up the toilet where the crime was committed, thus destroying evidences.
