A man accused of raping and killing an eight-year-old girl in a village in India has reportedly been beaten to death.
The man, named locally as Mithun Hansda, died near the city of Dumka, Jharkhand, after he was tied up and beaten by a group of locals, Prabhat Khabar reports.
The girl who died had been attending a wedding in nearby Jalwe village when she and a few other girls went to bathe in a nearby lake.
Hansda allegedly abducted the girl, raped her and killed her before leaving her body among the trees by the river bank, India Today reported.
The girl’s family began to search for her and eventually found her body. Enraged locals then tied Hansda to a tree and beat him repeatedly.
Footage of the beating shows the man tied with his arms behind his back and being dragged by a woman holding a long rope, while two other women beat him with large sticks.
Police later arrived and took both bodies into custody, ANI News reported, before releasing them to their respective families, following a post-mortem.
“We have taken the body in our custody, but so far it is not confirmed that the girl [was] raped or not”, the police’s deputy superintendent Roshan Gudiya said.
