By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter,
Beed (Maharashtra): Four days after the rape and murder of a 14 year girl and her 57 years old mother, belonging to the minority community, from a village of Beed district in Maharashtra, police have succeeded in arresting two youths for the brutal crime.
Achyut Chumte, 19, and Krishna Rama Reddy, 21, both residents of Choramba village in Dharur taluka in Beed district have been arrested on Tuesday by police after questioning 100 odd suspected men from the town.
The accused have been booked under sec. 3, 4, 5 and 6 of Child Abuse Act, 302, 376 and 34 of IPC.
Beed superintendent of police Anil Paraskar said, “Our investigation suspected the two youths, who were known for sexually assaulting children and even animals in the village. We rounded them up and grilled them separately. They confessed that they had first seen the girl on May 26 and had decided to rape her. They said they kept an eye on the house for two days before barging in on Thursday night.”
Choramba, a town in Beed has around 4,000 population with only six Muslim houses, all belonging to the same extended family.
The complaint lodged by the victim minor girl’s uncle Shaikh CHand Gulam, 65, a copy of which is with TwoCircles.net states that there was no male at home for some days as his brother was admitted to a hospital and the accused knew this fact due to which the minor was raped. She was later killed along with her mother on the night of May 27. “I discovered their naked dead bodies next evening when I visited their house’, the complaint reads.
Tension prevailed in the village and its vicinity after the incident and there were some protests which were undertaken by the Muslim community in Beed district and some other villages demanding immediate arrests of the culprits.
The villagers had brought the dead bodies to the police station demanding immediate arrest of the culprits and refused to take them for burial but the tension eased after senior police officers assured of immediate arrest in the case.
The postmortem report confirmed that the minor was raped before she and her mother were strangulated to death.
Many political leaders such as NCP chief Sharad Pawar, RPI chief Ramdas Athawale and MIM MLA Imtiaz Jaleel visited the village and met the victims’ family.
Speaking with TwoCircles.net Ilahi Khan Pathan, a social worker from Beed said, “This was a preplanned crime. Considering the fact that the village has negligible Muslim population such incidence was bound to happen. Till now we heard of Dalits being killed in this manner but now the similar violence is meted out towards Muslims too”.
On asking if similar incidences happened in past at the town, Khan said,” There is only a single family staying in the town and we seldom go to the town due to no other Muslims there. We never heard of such incidences there”.
Liaqat Khan, General Secretary of Maharashtra Action Committee, who visited the village for fact finding purpose lauded police action and said, “Police’s investigation in the matter is commendable. They have rounded up many suspects and have finally arrested culprits.”
“Although police have arrested accused but such offence directed towards minority community disregards the communal harmony and disturbs the peace and tranquility prevailing in the society”, he added.