AHMEDABAD: Police have stepped up vigil in Gujarat’s Surat district amid tension after the rape and murder of a minor girl, for which a migrant from Bihar has been named the main suspect, a senior official said on Wednesday.
The body of the three-and-a-half-year-old girl, who had gone missing, was found on Monday in a locked house in the building where she lived in Surat city.The police have increased vigil in Surat as a precautionary step in view of the situation across the state, where Hindi-speaking migrants, particularly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, have been attacked following the alleged rape of a 14-month-old by a migrant from Bihar in a village near Himmatnagar in north Gujarat.
“The situation is tense (in some pockets of Surat) not because the suspect is from Bihar, but because such an incident has happened. People are asking why such an incident took place. They (locals) are not against people from Uttar Pradesh or Bihar,” Surat police commissioner Satish Sharma said. He said the police were “trying their best” to nab the suspect.The victim and her parents lived on the first floor of a house, while the suspect used to live on the ground floor.
With inputs from PTI