A key reason why residents suspect Aslam of executing the crime is because the back gate of the house of the girl's grandfather opens into the locality where Aslam has another house.

The Sharma family has two corner houses in the same lane, right opposite each other. The lane is closed, and thus the girl would move between the two houses - her father’s and grandfather's - safely and frequently.

"She did not go anywhere else at all," the girl's uncle says. “There is no possibility of her going towards Jahid’s locality. No one seems to have spotted him here either.”

When she went missing around 8.30 am on 30 May, the family informed the Tappal police and launched a search operation on their own. They roamed around the village with loudspeakers, telling residents to be on the lookout for the baby. An FIR was filed the next day against an unknown accused under section 363 (kidnapping).

In the following days, the family extended their search to adjoining villages, but to no avail.

The family believes that the kidnappers would have thrown the girl’s body into the Yamuna river - some six kilometres away - but for the spirited search operation “that had almost the entire village on the streets”. "We feel the killers were left with no option but to eventually dump it in the garbage," the girl's maternal grandfather says.

He questions the police’s conduct in the initial days. He says the Tappal police did little to find the girl. "Had it been their own daughter, would they sit silently for four days?" he asks.

He also accuses them of trying to cover up the case. He says that when the body was discovered, the cops immediately took it to the police station and, without informing the family, began to take it “somewhere” in their vehicle. But residents confronted the cops, asking them where the blood relatives of the girl were.

“The police lied to them saying the girl's grandfather was in their vehicle. Residents protested saying he was still in the thana. The public understood that the police were trying to show the recovery at a distant location and forced the vehicle to stop,” he says. The body was then sent to the local hospital. Stuffed in a bag, it was later taken to Aligarh for post-mortem. This time, there were family members too, he says.

A relative says the police wanted to hush up the case as it was “a Hindu-Muslim matter”.

For the same reason, locals are criticising the police's hurried statement ruling out rape.