Five-year-old's rape: Manoj sent to 5 days police custody

New Delhi, April 25 (IANS) A Delhi court Thursday sent Manoj Sah, the prime accused in a five-year-old Delhi girl's rape-and-torture case, to five days' police custody to confront him with Pradeep, another accused in the case.

Additional Sessions Judge Sanjay Garg remanded Sah to police custody till April 30.

After the arrest of co-accused Pradeep, police had moved the court seeking Sah's remand to confront him with Pradeep to know the entire facts as well as to corroborate his version given to the investigators at the time of his arrest.

It also said Sah is needed to recover the mobile phones used by them and question him on new facts that might emerge during the probe.

Police said Sah has to be taken to his native place in Bihar's Muzzafarpur to recover the "blood-stained clothes which he was wearing at the time of commission of crime".

Sah's custody was also required for linking the evidence gathered so far and to find out the movement of the accused from the point of them leaving Delhi and reaching Bihar, they said,

With the permission of court, police also took the handwriting sample of Sah to match it with the handwriting on a piece of paper recovered from Pradeep that allegedly given to him by Sah with instruction to call him in two days when they left Delhi and parted ways at Chhapra.

Sah was arrested April 20 from his in-laws' house in Muzaffarpur.

He was produced before the court from judicial custody amid high security.

Police had Tuesday told the court that both Sah and Pradeep had raped the minor. Both the accused have been booked under the provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, which deals with cases of sexual offences where the victim is a child.

Sah, from whose rented room the girl was rescued two days after she went missing April 15, however, blamed Pradeep for the brutal attack on the child.

The court Tuesday granted police four days custody of Pradeep, 19, who was arrested April 22 from Bihar's Lakhisarai district where he was hiding at his maternal uncle's house and brought here on transit remand.

Sah said he lured the girl into his room by offering her chocolate, but blamed Pradeep for the rape.

He was sent to judicial custody till May 4 on April 21, following his two-day interrogation by police.

The girl was abducted and kept hostage for two days without food and water in the room in which the attackers lived on the ground floor of a building in east Delhi's Gandhi Nagar. The girl's family stays in the same building, police said.

The girl was rescued when members of her family heard her screams April 17.