A 22-year-old man was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly killing a minor girl after a failed rape attempt, police said, adding that the victim’s body was exhumed from his house in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr.
The accused, identified as Harendra, was arrested from Shimla.

The body of the 12-year-old girl was exhumed from a pit in his house on Tuesday, days after it was buried.

The girl was reported missing from her home in Bulandshahr district on February 25. An FIR was lodged on February 28 on the basis of the complaint of her father, a labourer, the police said.

“In his complaint, the girl’s father had said he suspected (Harendra). The body had been buried in a pit in the courtyard of the accused’s house and has been exhumed. He killed her and buried the body,” Bulandshahr senior superintendent of police Santosh Kumar Singh said.

According to the police, the accused lived alone in the house. The family is known to him and the girl would sometimes visit his house to drink water.

“On the day of the incident, when she went to his house to drink water, the accused confessed that he was inebriated. He tried to rape the girl but she started screaming and he choked her to death,” Singh said, adding the accused had absconded after the incident.

“We were on a lookout for him. Today, around 7.30am, he was tracked and arrested from Shimla,” the officer said.

The accused told the police that he worked as a labourer in Delhi and had come home in Bulandshahr, three days prior to the incident.