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Gingee girl missing for 16 days: suspect detained, CB-CID probe on, police say 90% chance she is alive
A suspect has been detained and questioned on day 16 of the search for a seven-year-old girl who vanished from her home near Gingee in Villupuram district on 12 October. The CB-CID has the case, and police say there is a 90 per cent chance she is alive. She has not been found.
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A suspect has been detained and is being questioned on the 16th day of the search for a seven-year-old girl who disappeared from her home near Gingee in Villupuram district of Tamil Nadu. Police said on Tuesday, 27 October, that the man is a repeat offender who has been involved in assault cases, and that they are examining whether he abducted the child and sold her. The girl has not been found. Police have said that there is a 90 per cent chance that she is alive.
How she went missing
The girl is a student of Class 2. She celebrated her seventh birthday on 11 October and slept that night with her parents, who are agricultural labourers, and her grandmother. She went missing in the early hours of 12 October, a few hours after the celebration. The Sathiyamangalam police registered the case, and their first inquiries produced no results.
The family has not been named here, and the child is not named, to protect her identity.
More than 100 police personnel, with drones, sniffer dogs and forensic experts, searched wells, water bodies, farm fields and forest areas near the village, and found no concrete leads. Eight special teams were formed under the supervision of three deputy superintendents of police. When there was no breakthrough after 10 days, the Director General of Police, Mahesh Kumar Agarwal, ordered the case to be transferred to the Crime Branch-CID, following criticism from political parties.
A deputy superintendent of the CB-CID from Kanchipuram was brought in when the investigation reached a deadlock of about two weeks, according to a Tamil report, and a Tamil channel reported him as saying that the inquiry would conclude in two to three days. That is a claim by the police and not a confirmed outcome.
The suspect
The man who has been detained is being interrogated. The reports describe him as a repeat offender who has been involved in assault cases, and say that the police are looking at whether he abducted the girl and sold her. Nothing has been established, and the police have not said what led them to him or whether he has confessed. A person who is detained for questioning has not been charged, and the information about the suspect should be read with that in mind.
The case has become a political issue. The opposition DMK held a road blockade to demand that the girl be traced quickly, and the PMK and other parties also demanded swift action. Tamil Nadu's Law Minister, R. Nirmal Kumar, said on Monday that the police were investigating from every conceivable angle and that the Director General of Police was reviewing progress every day. He said that no criminal would escape justice under the present administration, and he attacked the DMK, citing its failure to solve a murder case during its time in power and accusing it of corruption.
The government has defended the way the police have handled the matter, and the opposition has said that it took too long to bring in the specialist agency. Day counts differ between reports, with some saying 15 days and others 16, depending on when the count starts.
When a child is missing for this long, investigators look at several lines: relatives and people known to the family, the movements of vehicles near the village in the early hours, mobile phone records of those in the area and any records of people with a history of crimes against children. They also circulate her photograph and details to police stations in other states and to railway and bus stations, and they use the national portals for missing children.
Residents who have any information are urged to give it to the police, and to avoid spreading unverified claims and images on social media, which can mislead the investigation and cause harm to people who are not involved.
The questioning of the suspect is the key development. If it produces a lead on where the girl is, the search can be concentrated there. If it does not, the police will have to release him or charge him on the strength of evidence, and the search will continue. The family, which has waited for more than two weeks, is hoping for news. The most important fact at this stage is that the child has not been found, and that police say that she is likely to be alive.
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