Thane: A seven-year-old girl was raped and bludgeoned to death with a large stone by a man in Bhiwandi, police said on Sunday.

The accused was arrested within 10 hours of the crime and has been identified as Bharat Kori, 32, who belongs to Gonda district of Uttar Pradesh. He worked as a porter in a power loom factory in Bhiwandi.

Police said the incident took place at Karivli village in Bhiwandi on Saturday night, when the victim was playing outside her house at around 8.30 pm.

As she went missing, the family began to search the surrounding areas but could not find her. She was studying in the second standard in a Telugu school in Bhiwandi.

Police said that the victim’s father runs a small hotel, where the accused used to come for dinner. Following which, the girl’s family did not file any complaint in the police station, police said.

DCP Rajkumar Shinde from Bhiwandi said, “When locals went to a public toilet, they found the victim’s body, 100 metres away from her home. We were informed by the locals and rushed to the spot and found a big stone that was used to smash her to death.

The body was taken to the Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital for post-mortem.”

“Eight teams were constituted to track down the accused. One team found him from Varahaldevi garden, where he was in an inebriated state,” Shinde Said.

“During the interrogation, the accused revealed that he lured the victim on the pretext of giving an ice-cream. He took her to an isolated place near a toilet room and raped her. When she resisted, he hit her with a big stone,” said a police officer.

Bhiwandi’s Bhoiwada police has registered a case of rape and murder. The accused will be produced in the court on Monday.