Nepali Congress has deployed central committee member Ramesh Lekhak to study the rape and murder of Bhagrathi Bhatta of Baitadi.
The party has already demanded stringent action against those involved in the crime and NC President Sher Bahadur Deuba now has assigned his confidant Lekhak to study the incident. "You are informed with request that you have been deployed to Baitadi as the party's central representative on instruction of the president to conduct field study of the incident and submit a fact-based report," the letter sent to Lekhak by NC Chief Secretary Krishna Prasad Paudel reads.
Both Deuba and Lekhak are from the Far West province that also includes Baitadi.
The police attributing the autopsy report by Baitadi District Hospital have said the 17-year-old from Dogdakedar rural municipality 7 was killed after rape. "Postmortem has showed strangulation after rape as the cause of death," Chief of the Far West Police DIG Uttam Subedi told Setopati.
The police are investigating further to find out if it was a case of gang rape and sent all the material evidence collected from the spot to the forensic laboratory for tests.
Bhatta had gone missing missing while returning home from Sanatan Dharma Secondary School in Shreekot of Dogdakedar Wednesday afternoon. The 12th grader had to cross Lovelek Community Forest to return home. Her body was found by students in a gorge in the middle of the forest at around 4 pm Thursday with her shirt torn off and her pants pulled down below the knee, and teeth marks all over the body.
