An eight-year-old boy, whose body was found hanging from a tree, was murdered after allegedly being raped in Balochistan's Killa Abdullah district, it emerged on Friday.

According to Killa Abdullah Assistant Commissioner Jahanzeb Sheikh, unidentified persons raped and strangled the child to death in Kali Davian area in the suburbs of Killa Abdullah.

A search for the child was launched two days ago (on Wednesday) after he left his madressah temporarily but did not return to the seminary nor reached his home.

His body was later found hanging from a tree on Wednesday evening, Sheikh said, adding that a first-information report was registered the same day against unidentified persons and authorities were carrying out a search operation to arrest them.

The report of a post-mortem examination performed on the child in Quetta proved that two people had sexually assaulted him, he said.

The incident has come to light two days after the body of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, Zainab, who had gone missing on Tuesday evening while playing with other children outside her house, was found near Charsadda.

On Thursday, Charsadda police said the minor girl appeared to have been assaulted and tortured before being killed.

The hashtags #JusticeforZainab and #AnotherZainab were used on Twitter by netizens to express outrage over unabated cases of abuse and murder of children in the country.

Photos of the child's body were circulated on social media with many users comparing the incident to the 2018 rape and murder of eight-year-old Zainab Amin in Kasur.

Zainab Amin had gone missing on Jan 4, 2018, and five days later, a police constable deputed to trace the girl recovered her body from a heap of trash near the Shahbaz Khan Road.

Being the 12th such incident to occur within a 10-kilometre radius in Kasur in one year, Zainab's rape and murder had sparked outrage and protests across the country.

In March, a report by the NGO Sahil had revealed that a total of 2,846 child abuse cases were reported from across the country in 2019, with data showing that more than eight children suffered some form of abuse every day in Pakistan last year.