The man accused of raping and murdering a six-year-old girl in Hyderabad was found dead on a railway track on Thursday morning, the police said.
Telangana Police chief Mudireddy Mahendar Reddy tweeted a photo of the man’s body. The police said they identified him by the tattoos on his arms. Hyderabad Police Commissioner Anjani Kumar said the man might have died by suicide, NDTV reported.
Two days ago, the state’s Labour Minister Malla Reddy had said that the man would be killed in an encounter.
Pallakonda Raju, the child’s neighbour, had allegedly raped and murdered her in Hyderabad’s Saidabad area on September 9. Her body was found in his house in Singareni Colony the next day. A postmortem report confirmed that the girl had been raped and strangled.
Two days after the child’s body was found, Telangana minister KT Rama Rao tweeted that the accused had been arrested. Rao retracted the tweet later, saying that he had been misinformed.
“The perpetrator is absconding and [the] Hyderabad City Police has launched a massive manhunt for him,” Rao tweeted on September 14. “Let’s all make our best efforts to ensure he’s nabbed and brought to justice quickly.”
Protests had erupted in the locality where the incident took place after the news of the man’s arrest turned out to be false, NDTV reported. The residents demanded justice for the child’s family, with some even calling for the accused to be shot dead in an encounter.
The man had been missing since the police found the child’s body in his house, according to NDTV. A Rs 10-lakh reward had been announced for any information about the suspect.
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