QUETTA: The suspect involved in the rape attempt and murder of a little girl from Hazara community has been arrested and confessed to the crime, officials say.

Addressing a press conference here on Friday, SSP Syed Asad Shah said there was no sectarian dimension to the crime as had been suggested by some human rights organisations and in comments posted on social media.

He said the six-year-old girl was strangled to death allegedly by a 24-year-old jobless man who lived in the PSB Colony near the victim’s house. The suspect was identified as Junaid Shehzad.

Junaid told interrogators that the girl frequently visited his house to play with his sisters. He was alone at his home on Oct 29, when she came. He asked her to sit in the veranda and brought a cake and apples for her.

The SSP quoted Shehzad as having told the interrogators that he made an attempt to rape the girl and then decided to silence her out of fear that she would tell her parents about what she had undergone.

“Shehzad strangled the child with a piece of cloth and dumped the body in a drum at a garbage heap,” he said, adding that the rest of the cloth had been seized on the suspect.

The SSP regretted that some people had claimed in their social media comments that a cleric was involved in the crime and one rights organisation had even alleged that he (cleric) had been arrested and then released after bribing the police.

Published in Dawn, November 29th , 2014