A 50-year-old man, Islamuddin, has been arrested for raping and murdering a minor girl aged 13 in Assam’s Cachar district, reports PratidinTime.com.

The girl, missing since Sunday, was found dead in a forest area. The accused is a neighbor of the victim. As per reports, on Sunday evening, the minor girl went missing after she had gone to attend a marriage party at her relatives’ place.

An official from the Joypur police station said that the victim’s younger brother, who is aged around 11 years, told the family members that a man offered chocolate to both of them but he refused to take it. “According to the boy, his sister accepted it and agreed to go with the man. He tried to follow them but the man threatened him and he came back. He later identified the man when the girl went missing,” the official said.

It is feared that there could be other accused apart from Islamuddin, and the girl might have been gangraped before being murdered.

According to the girl’s family members, they searched for their daughter on Sunday night. The next morning, their son told them about how his sister went with an elderly man. “The accused is known to us and our son said that there were more men with him. We suspect that they gangraped her before killing,” the family members said.

The family members lodged an FIR after getting no trace of the missing girl. After the police launched investigations, a 50-year-old man identified as Islamuddin was arrested on Wednesday.

Upon interrogating Islamuddin, he admitted that he had taken the minor girl to a jungle and raped and then murdered her, reports PratidinTime.

However, Hindustan Times quoted Sub-divisional police officer of Lakhipur, Dinesh Kumar, as saying “Just after the arrest, he confessed the crime and we found the dead body as well. It is suspected that he raped the victim and the truth will come out once we get the test reports. We are still interrogating him.”

The victim’s body has been sent for post-mortem. “There are marks near her throat and it is suspected that she was strangled to death,” an official said.

It is pertinent to note that Hindustan Times (HT) has failed to mention the name of a man who confessed to abducting a minor girl and who stands accused of such a ghastly crime. Such ‘secular censorship’ is par for the course for English-language mainstream media, which otherwise goes into overdrive to expose all details of an accused’s life including his socio-political affiliations, if the news fits the Hinduphobic narrative which is their stock in trade.

HT also tried to plant a defense for the accused in reader’s minds by adding –

“To be sure, a confession or disclosure statement of any person made before a police officer is not admissible as evidence before a court unless it is backed by other evidence. Only a confession before a judge is admissible as evidence against an accused.”

In September, auto rickshaw driver Suhel Ahmed Kazi (19) kidnapped and raped a minor in Udharbond police station area of Cachar.