After the heart-breaking incident of rape and strangulation to death of a girl near Kochi, hundreds turned up on Sunday at the school where her body was kept to pay their respects and demanded stringent punishment, especially death, for the accused.
People, cutting across all ages and from all walks of life, turned up to pay tribute to the child at the school where she was a student till Thursday.
A large crowd was also present at the public cemetary where the victim's body was buried close to 11 am on Sunday after performing last rites.
Many in the crowd were seen crying as the last rites were performed and the coffin was laid into the ground, according to visuals shown on TV.
On Friday, she was abducted, brutally raped and killed allegedly by a migrant worker from Bihar who lived in the same building as the child's family who too hailed from the same state.
Her body was found dumped in a sack in a marshy area behind a local market in the nearby Aluva area on Saturday.
The accused was arrested on Friday itself, but could not be interrogated as he was in an inebriated state, the police had said.
Several women, including mothers of the victim's playmates and classmates, who were present at the school and the cemetary broke down and said that keeping the accused in jail and feeding him would not be justice.
"He should be killed in the same manner he killed the child. If the government cannot do it, hand him over to the public," they said.
Another woman said that it was a "shocking and heart-wrenching" incident.
"It is unbearable. I could not sleep properly after hearing about this incident. Our laws need to be made more stringent. This should not happen again," she said.
Congress MLA Anwar Sadath said he wants the government and the police to ensure that the accused get the highest punishment of death penalty.
"As a representative of the people and as a father that is what I want. I spoke to the Kerala CM yesterday (Saturday) and requested him not to see it as an isolated incident and end the probe here."
"Post this incident, parents everywhere are scared. So the government and the police need to be more vigilant to prevent recurrence of such incidents," he said.
Becoming emotional while speaking to reporters, the MLA said no one even thought the child would be killed in such a manner and everyone, including him, were hopeful that she would be rescued alive.
Bharatiya Janata Party's Kerala unit president K Surendran said there should be a system in place to identify any criminal elements among the migrant workers and the alleged use of drugs by some of them.
"There is no monitoring system in place. People are asking for a policing system based on the Uttar Pradesh model. Policing in Kerala is very weak. Proper investigation is not being carried out," he alleged.
BJP leader Sobha Surendran also demanded stringent punishment for the accused and urged people to come out on the streets demanding that the government take action to prevent such incidents from recurring.
After the incident, the opposition Congress had come down heavily on the state police and alleged lapses on their part in tracing the child.
Kerala police chief Shaik Darvesh Saheb had rejected the charges and said there were no lapses on behalf of the investigators.
The Kerala police had on Saturday posted an apology to the family of the victim on all its social media handles saying that their efforts to reunite the child with her parents proved unsuccessful.
