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In a shocking case, the Pune Police have arrested a 54-year-old man for the alleged kidnapping, rape and murder of two minor girls in the Rajgurunagar area of the city.
The man, identified as Ajay Das, is accused of committing the heinous crime with the two siblings aged nine and eight before he absconded, said a police official.
The incident occurred on Wednesday when the two girls were playing outside their home around noon, but later suddenly 'disappeared'.
The family, which was keeping an eye on them, started a frantic search in the vicinity but failed to trace them and finally in the evening lodged a complaint with the Khed Police Station.
Responding promptly, Police Inspector Prabhakar More formed teams to launch a system effort to trace the two missing sisters but did not get any clues.
Late in the night, around 10.30 p.m., the police and the family inspected the two siblings' room on the upper floors of their building and made the shocking discovery.
The two girls' bodies were found at Das' home, in a huge drum filled with water, with their heads below and their feet up, pointing at murder by forcible drowning.
As the discovery created a sensation in the vicinity, the case was handed over to a woman Investigation Officer Snehal Raje, said the officials, while the victims' bodies were sent to the Sassoon Hospital in Pune for autopsies.
Cracking the whip, the Khed Police launched a manhunt for Das and apprehended him from his hideout in a shady lodging house early in the day (December 26) as he was packing up and preparing to flee out of Maharashtra.
This morning the grieving families along with other relatives, staged a sit-in dharna outside the police station, demanding that the culprit should be given the noose, and refused to accept the bodies of the two little girls.
As per preliminary questioning, Das is understood to have confessed to the double murder and also admitted that he had to kill them to suppress the matter secretly and also prevent them from screaming or attracting attention.
Although the accused was arrested by the police, the girls' relatives gathered at the Rajgurunagar police station, saying they would not take possession of the bodies till they got justice.
The brutal kidnap-rape-double murder has evoked strong reactions from Nationalist Congress Party (SP) Working President and MLA Rohit R. Pawar, Shiv Sena (UBT)'s Sanjay Raut and Kishore Tiwari and local Congress leaders, who slammed the ruling Mahayuti for what they termed as 'utter failure on the law-and-order front'.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by News Agency staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)