The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday expelled a party leader in Uttarakhand a day after he was booked for the alleged gang-rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in Haridwar district, reported The Telegraph.
The man, Aditya Raj Saini, and his associate Amit Saini were booked under sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.
Aditya Raj Saini was a state executive member of the Uttarakhand BJP’s OBC Morcha. He was also part of the Uttarakhand Other Backward Classes Commission, reported The Indian Express.
The 14-year-old girl’s mother told the police on Tuesday that Amit Saini had taken her daughter away from their home in Haridwar’s Bahadarabad area on June 23.
“We trusted him because he was known to us,” the girl’s mother said, according to The Telegraph. “After my daughter didn’t return home late in the night, I called Amit and he said she would soon return home but she didn’t.”
The mother told reporters on Wednesday that while searching for her daughter, she met Aditya Raj Saini as she knew that he was related to Amit and that the two of them were living together.
“The way Aditya Raj behaved with us was strange,” the mother said. “He threatened us against going to the police. Later, we heard from common acquaintances that Amit had taken my daughter to Aditya Raj’s house.”
The girl’s body was later found on the Roorkee-Haridwar highway. “Anybody could say after seeing her body that she was brutalised before being killed,” the mother said.
Superintendent of Police (City) Swatantra Kumar Singh said that a post-mortem would confirm the cause of death and that arrests would be made based on the autopsy report.
Uttarakhand Congress spokesperson Garima Mehra Dasauni described the incident as “chilling” and claimed that law and order in the state had gone “off the rails”, The Indian Express reported.
BJP spokesperson Manveer Singh Chauhan described Dasauni’s remarks as “politically coloured” and said that they could “harm the morale of investigating agencies”.
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