The Gujarat Police have asked their counterparts in Odisha to help identify a 11-year-old girl who was found dead in the city’s Bhestan locality on April 6, the Hindustan Times reported on Monday.
“The area where the body was recovered is an industrial belt and has many migrants from Odisha,” Surat Police Commissioner Satish Sharma said. “That is the reason we contacted Odisha police. We are also contacting other states.”
Minister of State for Home Pradeepsinh Jadeja confirmed that the postmortem suggested the girl was raped and tortured over eight days before she was strangled to death.
Jadeja said that the police had so far gone through 8,000 complaints related to missing children from Gujarat and other states. The police have also gone from door to door in all the localities in an 1.5-kilometre radius from the cricket ground where the body was found, NDTV reported. The investigators are also scanning footage from closed circuit television cameras in the area.
The police have announced a Rs 20,000 reward for information to help identify the girl. Besides circulating the message and a photograph of the child on social media, they have also put up 1,200 posters.
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