On Wednesday, 11th December, the Odisha Police in Sundargarh district arrested an individual identified as Kunu Kishan for murdering a girl on 7th December. The accused was already on bail in the minor victim’s rape case. He is believed to have killed the girl to try and avoid getting convicted in the case. Following which, he cut her murdered body into various pieces and threw them around various parts of the district.
As per the initial reports, the accused had been jailed in August 2023 for raping the same victim girl (now deceased) when she was a minor. As per the police, during his months in jail, he planned to take revenge against the girl and execute the crime after being released on bail on 7th December.
The incident came to the fore after the girl went missing from her home on 7th December. The girl’s family then filed a police complaint prompting the Dharuadihi police station to launch an investigation.
As per Jharsuguda Superintendent of Police Parmar Smit Parshottamdas, the police used Artificial intelligence to track the accused person and one of his associates who helped him murder the girl. The police checked the CCTV footage as a part of the investigation and saw the girl last being taken on a motorcycle by two men. The police then traced the accused and his associate who took the girl to National Highway 143, where they murdered her before chopping her body into several pieces.
The accused persons, when riding the motorcycle, were wearing helmets making it difficult for the police to identify them. However, the police used AI-backed CCTV footage to trace the accused and the victim. The police, as per the Indian Express report, fed their Smart City CCTV system with the victim’s image which narrowed down her image search to specific locations. The system also then helped peruse police records to narrow down a list of suspects, helping the police zero in on Kishan.
Later the police found the last location of the victim girl and traced her remains on the highway. The accused was recently released on bail on 4th December. He is believed to have murdered the victim out of fear of conviction in the earlier rape case in which the victim was a minor. As per the police, the next hearing of the minor rape case in which the accused was arrested in August 2023 was due on 15th December.
It is said that the accused, after being released on bail, had asked the girl and her family to issue a statement in his favor so that he could be saved from conviction. However, the girl refused. Following this, he decided to take revenge against the girl. He notably was already enraged by the girl and her family for sending him to jail. He also had planned revenge against the girl when he was inside the jail.
“The deceased filed a rape case against the accused person in Dharuadihi police station in Sundargarh district under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO). He was arrested on August 27, 2023, and was released on bail on December 4, 2023. The accused believed that he would be convicted if the deceased gave a statement in court and hatched the plan to kill her,” Jharsuguda Superintendent of Police Parmar Smit Parshottamdas confirmed.
