Mumbai, June 21: Post-mortem reports have confirmed that Nusrat Shaikh was raped for two to three days and then strangled.
The nine-year-old girl went missing from the Shramik Nagar locality at Alidada Compound in Kurla on June 6. The police and local people, comb ed the area and even the terraces of buildings in nearby areas over the past two weeks, but the girl could not be traced.
A stench from a locked shan ty in Vatsala Tai Nagar on Saturday aroused the suspicion of the residents. When a few people peeped inside, they found the decomposed body of a minor. Officers from the Nehru Nagar police station reached the spot and sent the body to JJ Hospital for post-mortem. “At first, I could not identify the body,” Nusrat’s father Khursheed said. “The police showed me some torn clothes, similar to those worn by Nusrat the day she went missing. This helped me identify my daughter.”
A JJ Hospital source said her deep vaginal injuries indicated that she had been repeatedly raped. Her vaginal swab and viscera has been sent to the forensic laboratory for testing, he said.
The police have recorded the statement of the owner of the shanty, Arshad Khatri. Ever since he bought the shanty from Draupadi Patil three months ago, Khatri has kept it locked. Even when Nusrat’s decomposed body was found, the lock on the door was intact. Khatri lives in Santa Cruz.
An officer said the same person is involved in earlier cases as well. “Earlier too, the minors were raped and murdered,” he said. “In this case, the person most likely did a recce of the area and zeroed in on the locked shanty to dispose of the body.”
The police have not ruled out the possibility of the person getting a duplicate key made to enter the shanty. “We are questioning locksmiths in the area,” he said. The police have detained 12 people based on details provided by local people and the two minor girls whom he had failed to kidnap.
–Agencies