IT was a worrying and also tensed situation in a farming settlement when eight-year-old Ashwini Mala Sharma was reported missing.
About 9:30am on January 16 in 2003, she had accompanied her grandmother and two elder sisters to a river at Nasau in Nadi for bath.
She took the lead to her home, which is about 50 metres away from the river on a steep road, after her bath.
But when her grandmother and elder sisters returned home, they found her missing and a major search was carried out by her family members and residents of the settlement.
There was only one house in between her home and the river.
Adults living in that house were out and only a 14-year-old boy was home at that time.
When a search was mounted for Ashwini, the boy joined the searchers and told them that an iTaukei man had taken her away on horseback.
He went around the area looking for the girl with her family members and residents of the settlement, including some police officers, but there was no sign of Ashwini being taken on horseback.
After some time, the boy left the search party and went to his home.
This resulted in people suspecting that the boy knew something more than what he had told the search party.
Family members of the missing girl and residents of the settlement were trying to figure out what could have happened when a police officer spotted something that broke the case.
The police officer was walking around near the boy’s house when he saw a blood-stained towel on the roof and he immediately went inside.
He saw the boy eating roti and tinned fish curry, and it did not take the law enforcer long to know what had happened to Ashwini.
“I went up to him and asked him about Ashwini and he just told me that her body was in the river some distance away from his home,” said the officer on condition of anonymity.
The boy told the police officer what he had done and how he had disposed the body in the river, also showing him the knife he used to kill Ashwini.
“Although the knife had been cleaned of the blood, there were some hair strands on the handle,” said the police officer.
“He pulled Ashwini from the road when she was returning home. He later stabbed Ashwini and slit her throat from ear to ear. He then took the body outside and threw it down a cliff.
“Then he took a shortcut and went down to the riverside where he had thrown the body. He then took the body some distance upstream.
“He dumped the body in the river and left a stone on top to stop it from floating downstream. He used the victim’s towel to wipe the blood inside his house.
“This particular case was one of the shocking ones of my career so far,” said the police officer.
I was at the scene when Ashwini’s body was discovered and the boy was arrested by police and taken away.
What worsened the situation then was that although the killer and Ashwini were Fijians of Indian descent, they were from different religious backgrounds.
Some family members and residents of the settlement tried to attack the boy but he was whisked away into the police officer’s car, which was also attacked.
They then turned on the boy’s family but anticipating such a thing to happen, police officers who were at the scene in numbers took the family away.
However, people in the settlement were still furious and they threatened to revenge the innocent girl’s brutal murder.
They did not mince their words and it was only a matter of hours when some people reacted to the little girl’s killing in the worst way they could.
The police officer said the boy’s house was burnt down the same night.
“People in the settlement and from nearby areas who knew the victim’s family were very angry at that time,” he said.
“Luckily, we had taken the boy’s family out of the house that afternoon and moved them elsewhere for their safety as people wanted to do something to them.
“Their house was burnt the same night, hours after the victim’s body was discovered and the boy arrested and his family moved from there.
“I took the boy’s family to their relatives but no one wanted to keep them even for one night because they came to know what the boy had done.
“Since there was no other place they could go to, they slept in a cane farm near the Votualevu roundabout in Nadi which is a commercial property now.”
The police officer said no one was charged in connection with the burning of the boy’s family home as there were no solid clues on who had done it.
But the boy was later tried in the High Court in Lautoka and jailed for life for Ashwini’s murder.
He was ordered to serve time at the Juvenile Boys Centre until such time he came of age before being transferred to other corrections facilities, said the police officer.
During a revisit to the scene on December 22 last year, I found that the house in which Ashwini was killed no longer stood there.
There was no sign that a house ever existed there, confirming that the house was razed and whatever remained was destroyed.
Ashwini’s family members referred me to her father who is a market vendor in Nadi but attempts to get in touch with him during a revisit to the scene proved futile.
However, he had told me in 2003 that only the boy would be able to tell me why he killed Ashwini.
The police officer said the killer’s family did not return to the area after they were taken out from there for their own safety.
He said while the boy would have served half of his sentence by now, there was no word on the whereabouts of his family members who once lived at Nasau.
Being a journalist and having covered many murder cases, the murder of Ashwini was one in which people did not mince their words when they talked about revenge.
Although they were prevented by police from doing anything to the killer or his family members, they may have found peace in burning the killer’s family home.
