Accused in Gandhinagar minor’s rape tries to flee custody, shot in the leg: Police

A second FIR will now be filed against the accused for attempting to escape lawful police custody, under BNS sections 265.

The case & investigation

On December 15, a minor girl was allegedly raped and the police registered a case after a medical examination. The police detained four persons for questioning the next day.

Subsequently, 15 teams of the Gandhinagar Police were put on this investigation. However, the lack of CCTV cameras, a forested area and the time of the incident, when not most people in the neighbourhood were asleep, made investigation difficult. Even a search of the entire area with the dog squad did not yield results, the Gandhinagar Police said in a statement on Saturday.

On how the scene of crime was later located, the statement said, “As the girl was recuperating in hospital, a woman police inspector frequently interacted with her over several days and developed a trusting relationship while slowly probing the details of the incident. The child gave her some details that led to the police piecing together a probable scene of crime near her house.”

The police said that the child also described the features of the accused to the inspector.

The Local Crime Branch and Special Operations Group checked CCTV footage of the area near the probable scene of crime when they got a hit on a suspect. However, since it was night time, the suspect could not be identified.

However, based on the direction in which he was headed, the police concentrated resources on a nearby industry cluster and made a list of around 300 local and migrant workers and went through footage from another 100 CCTVs.

They zeroed in on an under-construction site where the suspect could be working and spotted a match from the CCTV footage. They surrounded the site and apprehended the suspect.

The police statement claimed that, during interrogation, the suspect admitted to having targeted the child during his routine visits to the area. He told the police that on December 15, he entered her home and took her into the woods where he raped her, the statement said.