Haryana: Two minor Dalit girls raped, murdered in separate incidents; Class 12 student, seven others arrested

Two minor Dalit girls were allegedly raped and killed in separate incidents in Haryana, barely a month after a similar case involving a six-year-old girl had shook the state. Police said that one of the girls, a 15-year-old Class X student, had been brutally assaulted and her private parts mutilated. The body of the other victim, an 11-year-old girl, was found in a village in Panipat district on Sunday morning, a police official said. The official said she was abducted by two men on Saturday evening when she had gone out of her house to throw garbage in the village dumpyard. Rahul Sharma, superintendent of police, Panipat, told PTI over the phone that two men who lived in her neighbourhood were arrested on Sunday for the crime. After abducting her, the accused took her to a house, where they allegedly raped and strangled her. They also burnt her clothes in a bid to destroy evidence, the SP said. [caption id=“attachment_4022477” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] The 15-year-old girl had been missing since Tuesday. She left home to attend tuition classes, but never returned. Her body was found near a canal at Budha Khera village in Jind district’s Safidon town on Saturday, the police said. The girl, who belonged to a village in Kurukshetra district, had been brutally assaulted, an official said. Her private parts were mutilated and some of her vital organs had been ruptured, the official said. She was a Class X student, the police said, according to a report on  NDTV. It said the girl’s body was found with 19 severe injuries and signs of ‘‘unspeakable torture’’. “The body had many injury marks, the private parts were mutilated and there were lot of internal injuries. Signs of sexual assault are visible and looks like three-four people were responsible, a hard and blunt thing was inserted inside her, signs of drowning also found,” SK Dattarwal, a doctor at PGI Rohtak was quoted as saying by NDTV. According to a  Hindustan Times report, the police have detained six people from the victim’s native village of Jhansa in Kurukshetra district. The main accused is a Class XII student who lives in the victim’s neighbourhood. The police, however, is trying to verify his age, the report added. Two special investigation teams (SITs) under DSP-rank officers have been constituted to probe the incident, the Jind police said. Responding to the incidents, former Haryana chief minister  Bhupinder Singh Hooda on Sunday said there was a complete breakdown of law and order in the state. Hooda said the BJP government had failed to put a check on the rising crime graph. Demanding exemplary punishment for the culprits, he said, “This government has failed on all fronts. The law and order situation has completely broken down. Children are neither safe in schools nor in their homes. Such heinous crimes are increasing, but the government seems to be in slumber.” The two incidents come close on the heels of another incident last month, in which a six-year-old girl was violently raped and killed in Uklana area in Haryana’s Hisar district. Some unidentified men had allegedly abducted the girl when she was sleeping with her sister and mother at their home in a slum area. Doctors who conducted the post-mortem examination had said that the accused had inserted a wooden stick into the girl’s private parts, which ruptured her intestine. “When the body was handed over to us, it was soaked in blood,” a kin of the girl had told reporters. The brutal rape of the six-year-old, and the recent savage incidents, were a stark reminder of the 16 December 2012 incident, in which a physiotherapy intern was raped by a group of a men in a moving bus and a rod was inserted into her body. She died in a hospital 13 days later. With inputs from agencies