BEIJING — The Beijing police have arrested a woman for spreading online rumors in connection with the death of a migrant worker that touched off a rare protest in the Chinese capital on Wednesday, state-run media reported on Friday.

A 28-year-old Beijing woman surnamed Ma was arrested Thursday for writing on Sina Weibo, China’s largest Twitter-like microblog service, that the dead woman had been raped by seven security guards at a mall t on May 3 and then jumped from the roof of the building, the police told China Daily.

Suspicion that the victim, Yuan Liya, 22, from Anhui Province, was raped and possibly thrown off the roof led to a protest by hundreds of workers outside the Jingwen mall in the Fengtai district of Beijing on Wednesday. The authorities responded with a huge display of force, with thousands of officers swarming the area, about four miles south of Tiananmen Square.

The police have said their investigation found no indication that Ms. Yuan had been drugged, raped or murdered and suggested that her death had been a suicide.