Madhya Pradesh: Man held over murder of 8-year-old daughter; doctor suspects she was raped too

Guna: A man has been arrested in connection with the murder of his eight-year-old daughter in Madhya Pradesh’s Guna district, with a doctor suspecting that she was raped before being killed, an official said on Sunday.

The child’s body with a hand and a leg tied to a stone was found in a well on Saturday, three days after she went missing under Chachoda police station limits, some 75 km from the district headquarters, an official said.

Chachoda police station in-charge Machal Singh Mandeliya said suspicion arose about the likely involvement of the girl’s father as he was not showing any interest in the search for his daughter.

Citing the initial probe, he said the girl was last seen with her father before she went missing.

After the girl's body was found, police handed it over to her family after post-mortem, he said. Police detained the girl's father after her last rites on Sunday morning, Mandeliya said.

The father told the investigators that he killed the girl and dumped her body in a well after tying her hand and leg to a stone with a towel.

Chachoda's Sub Divisional Officer of Police (SDOP) Divya Rajawat said in the preliminary post-mortem report, Dr Ankit Upadhyaya from the local government hospital has expressed suspicion that the girl was raped before being murdered.

Further investigation is underway, the official added.