An eight-year-old girl, who had gone to a friend's birthday party, was murdered after allegedly being raped by a man in Maharashtra's Palghar district, police said on Wednesday.

The police have arrested a 21-year-old son of a former sarpanch (village head) in this connection, an official said.

The victim, resident of a village in Mokhada taluka, went to the birthday party of her friend in the village on Sunday but did not return home.

Her family members then carried out a search for her.

The victim's body was found near a graveyard in the village late Sunday night. The police sent the body for postmortem and initiated a probe into the girl's death, Mokhada police station's assistant inspector Premnath Dhole said.

A police probe team worked on various leads, including technical and intelligence inputs, and arrested the man on Tuesday, he said.

The man allegedly stalked the girl on Sunday and then raped and murdered her at night, he said.

The mother of the accused was earlier a local councillor, as per the police.

The accused has been booked under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections 103(1) (murder), 65 (2) (rape of a female under 12 years of age) and 66 (punishment for causing death or resulting in a persistent vegetative state of the victim) and provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, Dhole said.

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