Kolkata: One detained in connection with 8-year-old girl's murder case

Kolkata, Feb 5: One person was detained in connection with the probe into the sexual abuse and murder of a minor girl in the city, police said on Friday.

The girl''s body was recovered on Thursday from the staircase of a residential building in the city''s Jorabagan area, sparking protests by locals, who claimed that the "police did not take action when the family had reported that she was missing".

"We have detained one person from the locality and are interrogating him. He works as a security guard of a residential building in the area. Probably, he knows certain things as we found a discrepancy in his statement," a senior officer said.

The Kolkata Police''s detective department has taken over the investigation, he said.

"We are also talking to the residents of the building from where the girl''s body was recovered. She might be killed somewhere else and her body was dumped inside the building. It seems that the criminal or the group of criminals came from outside," the officer said.

The nine-year-old girl, who was found lying in a pool of blood on the staircase that led to the terrace of the multi-storey building, was "first sexually abused and then killed", the police had said.

The victim, a resident of Sovabazar area in the city, was visiting her maternal uncle''s residence in Jorabagan.

Preliminary investigations suggested that the girl, who went missing on Wednesday evening, was sexually abused, thrashed, strangled before her throat was slit by a person or a group of persons, they said.

Sleuths of the Kolkata Police spotted a couple of teeth and a few hair strands on the staircase where the minor''s body was found.

A blood-stained knife, suspected to be the murder weapon, was found from a drain, just beside the multi-storey building, the officer said.