Police are investigating a rape case after a 13-year-old girl from Kewtown went missing last Wednesday.
According to Athlone police station spokeswoman Sergeant Zita Nor-
man, the teen came home the next day, Thursday July 26, and told her parents she had been raped by a man who had held her against her will.
Sergeant Norman said according to the girl’s statement to the police, a neighbour’s son lured her to his house where he gave her cool drink and afterwards raped her repeatedly during the course of Wednesday night, before releasing her.
Sergeant Norman said police arrested a 39-year-old man on Thursday night and he appeared in the Athlone Magistrate’s Court on Monday. She said he had no previous criminal charges against him.
According to a report in the Daily Voice, the girl’s grandmother said the child had claimed there was “white stuff” in the cool drink she had been given and it “did not taste right”.
The grandmother said the suspect had told her granddaughter to get in the bath and when she had
refused, he had choked her and thrown her in.
“He forced her to shave her pubic hair, and she ended up cutting herself. At the hospital, they told us the blade was dirty and she now has an infection.”
Her granddaughter had said she’d passed out. When she woke up, the man had been forcing his penis into her mouth, the girl had told her grandmother.
“He was violent and her whole neck has marks the way he went on. The doctors told us that she also now has an infection in her mouth and throat,” she said.