STAFF CORRESPONDENT

On Monday afternoon, five-year-old Roza Moni got hungry while playing in front of her house in Tejgaon’s Tejkunipara. She went to her mother and asked for lunch, but the meal was not ready yet.

Her mother, Shilpi Begum, asked her to wait a little and go back to playing.

About half an hour later, when the meal -- consisting of mola fish that Roza picked up in the local kitchen market -- was finally ready, Shilpi called out for her daughter.

But there was no response. Despite combing the neighbourhood frenetically, Roza was nowhere to be found.

The next day, Roza’s lifeless body was discovered.

Her small, fragile body had been wrapped in three layers of bags. A rope was tightly wound around her neck, indicating the horrific abuse she suffered before her death.

“Why did they kill my innocent daughter so brutally?” Shilpi cried out, her voice breaking with grief at their tin-shed one-room house, where she and her children had hoped for a better life.

“We want justice,” said Shirin Akter, Roza’s elder sister, her eyes filled with sorrow and tears.

After Roza went missing on Monday, the family’s frantic search began.

In the evening, they, along with their neighbours, made desperate announcements over loudspeakers and continued to search the area through the night, praying to find her.

Roza’s body was discovered just yards behind their home, on a plot where a tin shed structure was being demolished to make way for a new building.

The family had moved to Dhaka from Narsingdi just eight months ago. Shilpi started living in the house with her six children just two weeks ago, since her husband, Nur Alam, had lost his job in Malaysia.

To support her family, Shilpi worked as a domestic worker for others.

Anwar Hossain, a day labourer who had been demolishing the tin-shed structure for several days, said that they left the site around 5:30pm on Monday but did not notice anything unusual.

“When we returned in the morning, we saw a sack, and when it was opened by locals, including the victim’s two sisters, we found the little girl inside,” he said, his voice filled with shock and sorrow.

Mobarak Hossain, the officer-in-charge of Tejgaon Police Station, confirmed that it was a murder case and assured that the police were doing everything they could to arrest the killers.

An autopsy was conducted at Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College morgue. Morgue sources said the body was decomposed, and she might have been strangled in the evening.