Class XII girl found murdered after rape in city's VIP zone

Lucknow: The decomposed body of a class 12 girl, missing for past five days, was found early on Monday near Lohia Path in the VIP zone of the city, shocking the city folk and sending cops into a tizzy. The spot where the body was spotted is between chief minister AkhileshYadav’s official residence at 5 KD Marg and state DGP’s office in Dalibagh.
The girl had left for school on February 10 and when she did not return, her parents filed an FIR, police said.
The sensational murder and recovery of the body went viral on social media, prompting the CM to assure people through a tweet that a special task force under DGP JaveedAhmad had been formed to investigate it.
The post mortem report confirmed death due to a head injury. Injury marks on her nude body also suggested that she was brutally raped and sodomised before being killed. Two persons were detained for questioning.
Daughter of a private construction company employee, Shuchita (name changed), the 17-year-old student of a reputed school, was the youngest and the most loved one in the family of four.
On February 10, carrying a school bag, she left home at around 8 am for her physics practical exam on a bicycle, but never reached school.
When she did not return home by evening, her parents approached Jankipuram police station at around 5pm to lodge a complaint.
“Initially, the police did not take the complaint seriously. They acted only after I contacted a senior police officers known to me,” the distraught father told TOI.
Shuchita’s body was found by Deepu, a rickshawpuller, on February 11, who took away the mobile phone lying alongside, and gave it to his wife in Haidergarh in Barabanki, 25 km away, without telling anybody about what he had stumbled on.
When calls were made from that phone, cops located his wife, who told them how she came into possession of the mobile phone.
Cops tracked Deepu (40) at around midnight on February 14. On being questioned he told police that he and his friend Satyam (20), who also plies rickshaw, found a girl hanging from a eucalyptus tree from a scarf, besides Haider Canal, when they had gone to answer nature’s call.
“Thinking she was alive, Deepu said he went near her but when he found that the girl was dead, he left the place with her blazer and her mobile phone,” Lucknow police chief RajeshPandey told reporters.
On Monday morning, the police reached the spot identified by Deepu but body was not there. The police then scanned the entire area with five sniffer dogs. Later, 12 divers pulled the body out of the drain.