A teenager who was murdered in Bihar’s Gaya was not raped, police said on Thursday after receiving the autopsy report. Police officials also ruled out the possibility that the murder had been an “honour killing”, although the girl’s father and his friend are in custody.
The decapitated body of the 16-year-old was found on January 6 after she went missing on December 28. The cause of death has not been determined yet.
The post-mortem report found injuries on the girl’s body but said that the wounds did not seem to have caused the death. The report mentioned “hard and blunt forces not sufficient to cause death”, said the Indian Express. The “skull bones are intact, brain is liquefied. Whole neck is missing. Both lungs, trachea, heart and oesophagus are missing and appear to be eaten away by animals…”
The police said that the head may have been cut off.
The autopsy determined that the girl had died two to five days before her body was found. She was not raped, as the family had claimed, the police said.
“The post-mortem report has made one thing clear, that it was not murder after rape,” Gaya Senior Superintendent of Police Rajiv Mishra was quoted as saying by the Indian Express. Explaining why police had picked up the father of the girl and his friend, Mishra said, “We arrested them after the victim’s elder sister said that her father had asked her sister to accompany his friend after the missing girl had returned [home] on December 31.”
The police are still looking for motive and the case is open-ended.
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