The body of a 15-year-old Dalit girl was found near a canal in Haryana’s Jind district on January 12, and a medical examination revealed that she was raped by several individuals, The Indian Express reported on Monday. The girl had been missing from Kurukshetra city since January 9.

Her body was taken to Rohtak’s Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences for an autopsy. “It does not seem to be the case of rape by one person,” Dr SK Dhattarwal, head of forensic medicine at PGIMS told The Indian Express. “She was probably sexually assaulted by more than two persons. They might have tried to thrust some object in her vagina also. Her liver was found ruptured”. Dhattarwal said there were at least 19 injuries on the girl’s body.

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“There was only a torn shirt on her body. The injuries were all around the body, on the face, neck, lips and chest,” Dhattarwal added. “It appears that the victim had struggled a lot to escape from the sexual assault”.

Dhattarwal also said that the girl had probably been killed two or three days before her body was found. “It also appears that she was drowned after the assault. We have sought a report of the scene of crime before giving our final report on her cause of death,” he added.

The girl’s father had lodged a police complaint on January 10 about her disappearance.

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Jind Superintendent of Police Sunil Kumar said police officials suspected that a boy from the girl’s village had committed the murder. Kurukshetra Superintendent of Police Abhishek Garg told The Times of India that the police had formed a Special Investigation Team and four other squads to find the accused.

The teenager’s family in Kurukshetra initially refused to accept her body for cremation. They demanded that the case be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation, a government job for a family member, Rs 50 lakh from the Nirbhaya Fund and two arms licences. After Haryana minister KK Bedi assured the family of a time-bound inquiry, they took the body to perform the last rites.