A five-year-old girl was brutally raped and strangled to death after she was abducted by one Ashfaq Alam from her house in Kerala’s Kochi. The police found the girl’s body inside a sack at Aluva Market on Saturday, nearly 21 hours after she was abducted on Friday.

“We found from CCTV footage that the girl was accompanied by a migrant labourer who lives near her rented home, and we identified him as Ashfaq Alam. After two hours of intensive searching, we picked him up. He was drunk and changed his version of the incident several times. He even tried to mislead the police by claiming he had sold the girl. Only after 16 hours [of interrogation] did he confess to the crime,” A. Srinivas, deputy inspector general of police (central range), told India Today.

The police booked Alam under Sections 364 (kidnap or abduction to murder), 367 (kidnap or abduction to cause grievous hurt), 376A (causing death), 376AB (rape on a woman under 12 years of age), 377 (unnatural offences), and 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and provisions of the Protection of Children From Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. Alam is in judicial custody until August 13.

The victim was the daughter of a migrant couple, Meera and Ashok, who hail from Gopalganj in Bihar and have been living in Kerala for the past few years.

Alam had rented a room near their home on July 22 and is suspected of having befriended the girl in the absence of her parents.

According to the police, on the day the minor girl was abducted, her father was at a construction site in Palakkad, while her mother was working at a site in Aluva town. “Neighbours called up the father to inform him her daughter had been seen following a stranger around 3 p.m. on July 28. He alerted his wife, who reached home to find their daughter missing. A police complaint was filed around 7 p.m. The suspect was detained around 9.30 p.m., and the girl’s body was recovered 21 hours later,” a police official said.