Hyderabad: Girl's rape case nears closure

Hyderabad: A local court on Friday reserved the judgement to August 31 in the year-old case relating rape and murder of a 12-year-old at Bhavaninagar.

During the trial, the first metropolitan sessions judge examined 28 witnesses. The court rejected the accused’s bail petition around seven times. The case relates to a girl, who was abducted and murdered by fruit vendor Shaikh Dastagiri.

Upon inquiry, the police found that the accused had intercepted the girl when she was going to buy meat and showed her obscene pictures in his mobile.

When he continued to follow her, police found that the victim had warned that she would inform her uncle. Seeing that there were no one nearby he dragged her into an under-construction building where raped and strangled her. He dumped the body in the sump.

Three days after the incident, residents found her body in the sump. Dastagiri had even participated in the funeral of the girl, who used to stay with her mother while her father works in Dubai.

Autopsy reports, however, revealed that she was raped before being killed.

Following this, a case for kidnap, rape, unnatural offences, murder and under charges of Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act was registered.

During the investigation, police identified Dastagiri after analy-sing CCTV footage at Amannagar and Gowlipura.

After coming to know about this, Dastagiri fled to Basavakalyan in Karnataka. He returned back to Hyderabad after he found police movement in Karnataka too. Though he went into hiding, police caught him in the city.