Two-Year-Old’s Murder For ‘Revenge’ In Aligarh Shocks Nation

New Delhi: Aligarh woke up on Sunday to the shocking sight of stray dogs pulling at what appeared to be human body parts from a garbage dump.

It turned out to be the mutilated body of a two-year-old girl missing since May 30. The police say the child was killed by neighbours, who had a loan dispute with her grandfather, reports NDTV.

A hashtag using her name and trending on social media has brought the case to national attention. Over 17,000 tweets expressing horror and outrage have been posted in the last 24 hours. Many have called for the harshest possible punishment for the killers.

The Aligarh police say the child was strangled but the post-mortem has not confirmed rape. An arm and a leg were broken. The police said her eyes were not gouged out, as her family alleges, but appeared so because the body was heavily decomposed.

The child’s body was found close to her home on the outskirts of Aligarh. Two men arrested for the murder, Zahid and Aslam, lived less than half a km away.

The police say Zahid had taken a loan of Rs 50,000 from the girl’s grandfather and still owed him money, over which the two had a fight on two days before the child was kidnapped. Zahid, the girl’s family alleges, had threatened revenge for his “humiliation”.