MARDAN: The district nazim and local doctors have claimed that the four-year-old girl, whose body was found on Sunday evening, was assaulted before her murder.

District nazim Himayatullah Mayar told Dawn that the toddler was playing outside her house in Gojar Ghari area of the district when unidentified assailant picked her up and took her to the nearby sugarcane field where she was raped and later strangled to death.

The body of the victim was found a day later on Sunday evening.

Mr Mayar said that postmortem report suggested that the victim was raped. He said that there were marks of strangulation on her neck. He said that so far they were satisfied with police investigations. However, he said that police were trying to hide sexual assault on the victim.

“Police are just trying to save the image of provincial government by distorting facts,” said Mr Mayar. He added that so far no functionary of the provincial government visited the family of the victim nor bothered to condemn the incident.

The nazim said that ANP would protest the incident on Wednesday (today). He also criticised media for ignoring the incident.

The doctors and relatives of the victim also suspect that the toddler was raped before she was strangled to death. The girl had gone missing on Saturday evening and her body was found at a sugarcane field on Sunday evening. Police confirmed on Monday that she was strangled to death and there were bruises on her body.

The doctors at the district headquarters hospital and relatives of the girl told this scribe on the condition of anonymity that they were 95 per cent sure that she was raped before being murdered.

One of her relatives accused the district police of hushing up the matter and feeding an alternative story to media and people. He equated the incident with that of Kasur where seven-year-old Zainab Ansari was raped and later strangled to death.

He alleged that police had taken Zahir Mohammad, the complainant in the case and maternal uncle of the victim, to the police station and pressurised him to refrain from talking to reporters.

He said that police had given three days for results of the forensic test of the swabs taken from the body of the victim. “The deadline expires today,” he added.

He said that they would hold protest as well as press conference if police officials and doctors did not give them the real result of the forensic test.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2018