Hundreds of irate people staged a road blockade and gheraoed the Shahjehanabad police station in the state capital accusing the police of negligence after the body of a five-year-old girl, who went missing from a multi- storey building on Tuesday, was found inside a water tank in a flat of the same building on Thursday.

The girl’s family and other residents of the building were frustrated with the police functioning, as they claimed that despite demanding the police for the past two days to break open the door of the locked flat in the building the police did nothing.

The police had searched all the flats of the building but did not break open the lock of the flat where the body was eventually found today. On the other hand, the police had deployed at least 100 of its personnel besides drones and divers too, in order to search for the missing child in nearby water bodies and even in the drains of the area.

Sources said that the police have detained two suspects, including a youth who is the tenant in the flat where the body was found, for questioning. They added that the police suspect sexual assault too, as the victim’s family did not receive any ransom call from anyone in the past two days.The body has since been sent for postmortem to confirm the cause of death and further investigations are on.

Local MLA from Bhopal (North) constituency Atif Aqueel also reached the spot.

The child had gone missing from the multi -storey building in which her parents live in the Shahjehanabad area of Bhopal on Tuesday afternoon. Her parents were not home and she was at her paternal grandmother’s house, who also lives in a flat above her house in the same building.

According to Shahjehanabad police station Inspector U P S Chauhan, the CCTV footage had shown that the child came out of her grandmother’s house on Tuesday afternoon. She did not return after that.

The grandmother had told the police that her granddaughter had gone to get a book from her house downstairs but when she did not return for a long time, she informed the child’s parents and a search was launched, but in vain.

Subsequently, the family lodged a missing person complaint at the Shahjehanabad police station.