Cemetery Caretaker Kills And Buries 6-Year-Old Girl After Failed Rape Attempt

A man was taken into custody over the weekend in connection with the murder of a 6-year-old child whose body was found buried at a graveyard Sunday.

The child went missing seven months ago while on her way to a grocery store in Chichawanti, a city within the Pakistani province of Punjab. She could not be traced despite intensive search efforts by the cops, reported The Express Tribune.

The incident was then determined as a case of abduction and cops launched an investigation. Authorities initially suspected that the girl's stepfather, identified as Muslim Sakhi, had a hand at her disappearance.

However, they later identified her relative, Mushtaq Ahmad, as the prime suspect in the case. Ahmad was employed as a caretaker of the village graveyard.

Seven months after the child's abduction, Sahiwal Muhammad Kashif Aslam, district police officer, reopened the investigation after going through the information gathered from the girl's family.

The police also interrogated the child's biological father, whose revelations helped the officers take the investigation in the right direction.

When the police questioned Ahmad, he confessed to killing the girl.

"After abduction, I tried to sexually abuse the girl but after I failed, I strangled and killed her for fear of being caught. I dug a place in the cemetery and buried her at night," Ahmad told the deputies.

Following his confession, Ahmad told the police about the victim's clothes and where her grave was located.

In June, a 10-year-old girl was raped and killed by a 35-year-old man who lived as a tenant near the child house in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The suspect was at the girl's house to celebrate an Indian festival called Raksha Bandhan and got drunk after the festivity. He then lured the girl away from her family and sexually molested her before taking her life. The police found the girl's body dumped near a canal and arrested the man.

Sexual violence remains a huge problem in South Asia. In 2016 alone, India lodged 39,608 rape cases, at least 520 of which involved children under the age of 6. In Pakistan, on the other hand, rape is said to occur every hour.

Based on a November 2020 blog post by World Bank, a lot of women in South Asia consider sexual harassment and violence a normal part of their daily lives. Many of them still have fears when walking down the street and commuting alone.