CHENNAI: The 15-year-old schoolgirl, whose skeletal remains were recovered from a canal near Pothatturpettai in Tiruvallur district last Sunday, was gangraped by her boyfriend and four others for five days before she died of excessive bleeding, police said on Thursday. They have arrested the boyfriend, who is also her relative, and have launched a hunt for the other four. The girl’s parents lashed out at the police saying their daughter could have been saved if the police had acted on their complaint at once instead of dismissing it saying she may have eloped.Police said the 20-year-old main accused had met the class X student on September 7, 2018, while she was on her way to school and taken her to a shed housing a motorpump on a farm near their village. He raped her there and then called up the farm owner’s son and allowed him to rape her. Over the next five days, the girl was detained in the shed and repeatedly raped by the two and three other friends of the first man. The girl died of loss of blood over the five days of sexual assault The accused first buried the body near a farm. But fearing the police would trace the body, they dug it up and buried it on the banks of a canal at little away. Last Sunday, workers in a sugarcane field near the canal noticed the skeletal remains, which had apparently been dug up by dogs, and informed the police.Once the remains were found the police intensified their investigations and started compiling a list of people the girl was acquainted with. They initially suspected property dispute behind the murder. Police zeroed in on the main suspect because he suddenly disappeared from his house when the police were conducting a combing operation in the village. They managed to nab and under sustained interrogation, police said he confessed to the crime. Police are on the lookout for the other four men.Tiruvallur superintendent of police R Ponni and other officers took the main accused to the crime scene and recovered the girl’s school bag and books from the bushes nearby, where they had been dumped. The girl’s parents had filed a habeas corpus petition in the Madras high court in December after their repeated pleas to the police to trace their daughter had yielded no results. When she failed to return home from school even by 6pm on September 7, 2018, her father had lodged a complaint with the police. Inquiries then had shown she had not attended school, which was just two-km from where her body was found, and her friends had thought that she was unwell. “Had the police searched for her, they could have rescued her alive,” said her father.

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