A 10-year-old girl was brutally raped, murdered and burned in Bihar’s Kaimur district by a migrant laborer from Malda, West Bengal. The half-burnt body of the victim was recovered by police on October 7 from the premises of a residential school for Scheduled Tribe children in Dewri village.
A Special Investigation Team (SIT) was set up to investigate this matter. The girl’s father, who is a tea-seller, had lodged a complaint against two laborers and a case of murder was registered based on the details provided by him. Both the men, Abdul Qurban and Mohammed Murshid, were arrested on October 9.
However, Superintendent of Police Rakesh Kumar from the SIT had doubts about the case and continued investigation. The detainees were taken in police remand and interrogated about the murder; the crime scene was also recreated.
The SIT sought the help of forensic experts, used a dog squad, and included electronic surveillance experts in the investigation. Police also looked into leads from the footage of a CCTV camera of the school that showed a man entering the first floor of an under-construction building with the victim.
Based on the footage, the SIT arrested a man named Masidur Alam on October 27 from West Bengal’s Malda where he was hiding to evade arrest. They have also recovered a stone, a lighter, and a blood-stained iron rod used to carry out the murder.
Alam lured the girl to an under-construction part of the school and showed her porn videos. There he raped the minor and when she resisted, he inserted an iron rod inside her mouth, and later smashed her head with a stone and set her on fire.
The SP informed that they will be sending a report to the local court seeking the release of two detainees taken to custody earlier. This case has triggered an uproar in the area. Leaders of the opposition including Ritu Jaiswal of the Rashtriya Janata Dal have since visited Kaimur. They have condemned the government for failing to provide safety to the women and girls in the state and hinted that they would sit down for a state-wide agitation.
Mohammad Madisur Alam is among the several labourers from West Bengal who were called to work for the construction of the residential school. He is a resident of Pipartalla village, under Kaliachak Police Station in Malda district. Incidentally, Kaliachak had seen heavy violence in Jan 2016 when a mob of 1 lakh+ Muslims Hindus came out to protest Kamlesh Tiwari’s alleged blasphemous comment; they attacked police, BSF and Hindus. That violence was rationalised by CM Mamata Banerjee as ‘BSF vs people’.
We have often heard Garga Chatterjee, founder of radical Bengali sub-nationalist organization Bangla Pokkho which is infamous for its secessionist ideology, claim that migrant laborers from UP–Bihar come to West Bengal and ‘harass’ Bengali women. Chatterjee is a strong believer that there is no Islamist threat to Bengali Hindus and that all rogues in West Bengal come from the ‘cow-belt’ (pejorative term used to describe all Hindi-speakers).
Here we have a Muslim man from West Bengal who was employed as a labourer in Bihar, accused of mercilessly killing a 10-year-old. What will the likes of Garga Chatterjee say now? It has been over a month since the crime occurred – why haven’t Luteyns’ MSM reporters descended on Dewri village to ensure justice for the victim’s family, the way they camped out in Hathras?
