A 46-year-old man has been sentenced to death for the brutal rape and murder of a two-year-old girl he snatched from a slum.
Suresh Paswan had taken the toddler from a shanty town in Kolkata in India before dumping her body in a gutter near the city's racecourse.
A six-year trial heard the grim details of the case that began when the stablehand groomed the child who lived with her grandmother.
Paswan snatched the child in the middle of the night before sexually torturing and then killing her.
He was confronted by his victim's grandmother and her neighbours shortly afterwards but denied having seen her.
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But he was arrested the next day after witnesses said they had seen him walking away from the spot her body was dumped.
A post-mortem report recorded the child's death as manual strangulation.
The trial was told how Paswan had been trying to lure the child away for some time and the day before had offered her toffee.
Police believed that this was one of the reasons she did not raise the alarm when she was taken, reports the Times of India .
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The lengthy court case was drawn out as police struggled to trace witnesses, many of whom were homeless.
Despite this reports detailed how the killer had confessed to his crime within days and showed little remorse.
Paswan had moved to the Kolkata with his uncle in 2013, who he had lived with since losing his parents at a young age.
On sentencing him to hanging, the judge described the case as the "rarest of rare" incidents, reports The Week .
