KOLKATA – She had gone to buy a birthday present. One day later, the body of an 11-year-old girl was pulled from a pond in Baruipur, a town south of Kolkata in West Bengal, and police said she had been raped and murdered.
Within hours, the streets around her home became a site of something the officers could not control. A crowd gathered, then a crowd turned into a mob, and when the mob was finished, a man who had nothing to do with the girl’s death lay dead.
Four people died in connection with the case by Wednesday evening. Police arrested Prabhas Mondal, one of the four men accused of the rape and murder, during a crime scene investigation and shot him dead when they said he attempted to flee. At least 35 others were arrested on charges of incitement and violence related to the protests that swept through the district since the girl’s body was found.
The case has stirred acute anxiety in West Bengal, a state still processing the collective grief and rage that followed the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College in Kolkata in August 2024. That case took months to reach a verdict, inflamed tensions between the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress party and opposition groups, and produced one of the largest sustained protest movements the state had seen in a generation.
“We want justice, and we want it now,” said Mondal’s mother, speaking outside the family’s home in Baruipur on Wednesday morning. Her son, police said, was one of the men who raped and killed the girl. She said she did not believe it.
The four men arrested for the crime were identified by police as local residents known to the girl’s family. Investigators said the girl left her home on Sunday afternoon to purchase a gift for a relative’s birthday celebration. When she had not returned by evening, her family filed a missing persons report. Her body was found the following morning in a waterlogged area near the neighborhood.
The forensic evidence, according to police officials at a press conference Wednesday, confirmed she had been sexually assaulted before her death. The cause of death, they said, was drowning, though they declined to provide further details of what happened at the crime scene.
As word spread, so did the rage. Crowds gathered near the girl’s home and at the local police station, demanding immediate arrests. When those arrests came, with four men detained by Tuesday evening, the situation in the streets had already taken its own direction.
The man killed by the mob was identified by local officials as someone unconnected to the accused. He had been in the area when the crowd began its assault. By the time police arrived to intervene, he was already fatally injured. District police superintendent Arvind Kumar Anand confirmed the man’s death at a press conference Wednesday and said investigators were working to identify and charge those responsible.
“A heinous crime was committed against this child, and we have made arrests,” Anand said. “But the violence that followed cannot be excused. Taking the law into your own hands adds victims to the toll, it does not reduce them.”
The political reaction in West Bengal was swift. Opposition parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left Front, called for the state government to resign and demanded central government intervention. The ruling Trinamool Congress accused opponents of exploiting a tragedy to score political points.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s office issued a statement confirming that police were investigating both the crime and the mob killing with equal urgency.
West Bengal’s record on crimes against women and children has been the subject of sustained criticism from human rights organizations including Amnesty India, which has documented systemic failures in the investigation and prosecution of sexual violence cases in the state. The Baruipur case has drawn comparisons to the R.G. Kar murder, though the circumstances and institutional failures involved are different.
What the two cases share is the scale of public fury, and the way that fury, in both instances, found targets beyond the courts’ ability to reach.
As of Wednesday evening, three of the four men accused of the girl’s rape and murder remained in custody. The fourth, Prabhas Mondal, was dead. Whether his killing during the crime scene investigation will face independent scrutiny has not been announced. The man killed by the mob remained unidentified by name in official communications, according to NBC News, a gap in the record that local journalists covering the case have not allowed to pass unnoticed.
