Bangalore, Jul 10 (PTI) : Investigations by the Bangalore police into the kidnap and murder of a seven-year-old girl in the Ashoknagar area on Wednesday has led to the arrest of the uncle and aunt of the young child.
“The perpetrators of the kidnapped and murdered seven-year-old girl, who was found dead on Wednesday, are Salman (28) and his wife Shabareen (20) of Bharathinagar,” Bangalore police commisisoner Raghavendra Auradkar said here on Thursday.
The girl, a class two student at the Shree Dhanraj Phoolchand Hindi High School on Victoria Road was picked up from school on Wednesday at around 12.45 pm by her aunt Shabareen, after she told the girl’s teachers that her grandmother had suffered a cardiac arrest.
However, the girl’s elder sister Sheeba Ahmed, who is a teacher at the same school, was not informed by the aunt of the seven-year-old being taken away.
Narrating the sequence of events that led to the girl’s murder, Auradhkar said: ” Later in the day, the girl’s mother Sameera received a text message on her mobile stating that her daughter was kidnapped and that her family must pay Rs 10 lakh as ransom for the safe release of the girl.”
The child would be killed if the police were informed, the text message said.
The mother rushed to her daughter’s school and learnt that a woman had taken her away at around 12.45 pm.
On the basis of the description given by the teachers, Sameera suspected that the woman could be her sister-in-law (the wife of her brother Salman).
According to the police, Sameera called her brother Salman and asked him whether his wife had taken the girl away. Salman said his wife had not gone to the school and joined his sister in searching for the missing child. He also accompanied his sister to the police station to file a complaint at around 5 pm.
On the basis of the complaint, the Ashokanagar police formed two teams and began investigations.
The police started questioning him after they noticed him behaving suspiciously. Salman later gave in to the pressure and confessed before the police that that he and his wife had kidnapped the girl from school to claim a ransom. He told the police that they murdered the girl at around 3.30 pm before joining his sister in searching for the missing child.
After recording Salman’s statement, the police went to the house of the accused in Bharathinagar and recovered the body of the girl stashed under a cot.
The young girl was strangulated to death by the couple, police said.
Police said that the couple were aware that the father of the young girl Nasir Ahmed, a quality control officer in a multinational company in the Gulf, had returned to the city recently from the Gulf. “Salman and Shabareen had thought that they would get the money from Nasir by kidnapping his younger child,” police said.
Salman who was in the business of supplying fishes to aquariums earned a meagre amount and hence had made the plan to get quick bucks by kidnapping his niece, police said. “He was also in financial trouble after his wife had to carry out a medical termination of a pregnancy,” police said.