Ujjain rape case: victim's family learned of her whereabouts only via viral video

The 12-year-old girl who was sexually brutalised in Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain and is being treated at a government hospital in Indore, left her home in the state's Satna district for a school exam on 24 September, the police have said.

The family had also lodged a missing complaint at a police station in Satna, Ujjain SP Sachin Sharma told the media on Thursday, 29 September.

But her frantic family members received no word of her whereabouts until a video showing her in a bleeding and semi-naked state, pleading in vain for help on the streets of Ujjain, surfaced on social media two days later.

By the time, the Ujjain police had also learnt that the victim is from Satna district, though earlier they had assumed that she was possibly from Allahabad (Prayagraj) in Uttar Pradesh.

The victim’s father told media that he came to know about the incident after a relative showed him the viral video of his daughter walking on the streets in Ujjain. He said that his daughter, a student of class 8, had left for school, but did not come back home.

Ujjain police on Thursday claimed to have arrested the principal accused, Bharat Soni, an auto driver in the city. The police also confirmed that the girl had travelled from Satna to Ujjain.

However, there are still many questions the police are yet to find answers to, including how the girl reached Ujjain from Satna, what made her travel to Ujjain all of a sudden, and whether she travelled alone.

On the other hand, the accused Bharat Soni's family said their son has committed "a hideous crime and shamed them".

Ujjain police arrested Soni on Thursday evening and, when taken to the spot where he had violated the 12-year-old on 25 September, he tried to escape, colliding with a concrete wall and injuring himself in the process, the police said.

When Soni was brought to a hospital on Thursday night, a senior police official denied that he had been injured in police firing.

However, on Friday morning, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s office made a contrary statement on his social media account, saying that "the accused was injured in a police encounter", a post that was soon deleted from the CM’s social media.