Surat rape case: Man from Andhra Pradesh claims to be minor victim's father

Surat police on Tuesday said a man from Andhra Pradesh has approached them, claiming to be the father of the minor girl who was brutally raped and murdered, her body thrown close to a highway in Surat.

The man claims that his daughter had gone missing from outside their house in October last year. He brought his daughter’s Aadhaar card in order to confirm the identity of the minor victim.

However, Surat Police Commissioner Satish Sharma has said the identity of the victim and her relation with the man who claims to be her father will be confirmed only after a DNA test is performed on both of them. He also said that missing complaints at local police stations in Andhra Pradesh will be checked to verify the man’s relation with the deceased girl.

The case came to light when passersby found the body of the minor victim, lying in the bushes at a ground in Pandesara within the limits of Surat, and alerted the police. The body was recovered by the police on April 6.

A post-mortem conducted at a civil hospital in the city had shown that the minor girl’s body had 86 marks of injuries all over her body. including internal injuries.

Ganesh Govekar, a doctor at the civil hospital who conducted the post-mortem, had confirmed repeated sexual assault, strangulation and smothering. He added that the girl must have been kept in captivity and tortured, suggesting that the injuries could have been inflicted on the victim over a period ranging from one week to one day prior to recovery of the body.

The case had come to the fore when the entire nation was outraged by the callous treatment of rape cases by the respective BJP governments in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh and Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir.

Meanwhile, Surat Police was frantically trying to identify the victim who was aged between nine and eleven years old and belonged to either Odisha or West Bengal. They had put up over 1,200 posters of the girl across the city and in east-bound trains offering Rs 20,000 to anyone who provides information on the girl. The police also circulated her pictures on social media and are scanning through missing complaints in Odisha and Bengal.

Sharma had also indicated that the perpetrators of the crime did not belong to Surat as the body was found close to a national highway and no piece of evidence was found from the spot where the body was recovered.