A six-year-old girl was brutally murdered in Nalasopara East on Saturday by her 13-year-old cousin, as he believed that their relatives as well as neighbours loved her more than him. The boy—who took the child to a secluded spot, strangled her and smashed her face with a boulder—told the police that he had decided to resort to murder after watching a film on Raman Raghav, a Mumbai-based serial killer who attacked all his victims with hard, blunt objects in the 1960s. The incident occurred in the evening on a hillock near the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway. The Pelhar police have recovered the blood-stained boulder.

On Saturday afternoon, the deceased’s father brought her home from school and a few hours later, all the children in the family played in the open space near their house. After sunset, when the girl didn’t return home, her parents started a search operation in Nalasopara. A CCTV camera captured the boy taking the girl to a nearby hillock. When the father of the deceased, the teenager's maternal uncle, asked him where she was, the teenager told him that two unknown people had murdered her. Terrified, the girl’s parents approached Pelhar the police station.