A seven-year-old girl of Chipata’s Mafuta village has been strangled to death after allegedly being defiled by an unknown person on Wednesday.

Eastern Province Police Commissioner Luckson Sakala revealed this in a statement to News Diggers, explaining that the mother to the deceased, Zabeta Banda, aged 38, reported her daughter’s death in a phone call to Chipata Central Police Division.

Banda narrated that the assailant used a Chitenge material to strangle her child who sustained bleeding from the mouth, nose, right eye and the vagina.

“Brief facts are that on 13th May, 2019, at 05:00 hours, Zabeta Banda and her husband left their children sleeping at home and went to the field to harvest some maize. Whilst at the field, her (Banda’s) husband went to drink local brewed beer in the village. Later that same morning, Zabeta Banda’s children were seen playing within the village near a borehole. [As the day progressed], the deceased told her friends that she wanted to follow her mother at the field and she left while her friends continued playing near the borehole. As they were playing, some boys checked the direction where they were playing from and they saw their friend lying dead in a nearby bush, away from the route which she used to go and join her mother at field. The children went and informed other elderly people who also called the mother from the field and later, they called Chipata Central Police Station and reported the matter,” explained Sakala.

No arrest has been made, police say, but investigations have been instituted in the matter.
“Police visited the scene and found that the deceased was suspected to have been strangled with a piece of Chitenge material which was seen tied around her neck. Blood was seen coming out of the deceased’s nose, mouth, right eye and from the vagina. Police suspected that the deceased could have been murdered as she was being defiled. Later, the dead body was picked and deposited at Chipata Central Hospital Mortuary awaiting postmortem…More details to follow.”