Missing Girl’s Pet Dog Died of Dehydration

Kakinada: The pet dog of two-and-a-half-year-old Gnaneswari from Ch. Agraharam hamlet in Dondavaka panchayat in Tuni Rural mandal of Kakinada district died due to dehydration, a preliminary post-mortem report has determined.

While Gnaneswari has been missing since June 6, the pet dog, which followed her on the day she went missing, died on Saturday.

Toddler Gnaneswari had set out of her house looking for her father working on the 50-acre oil palm plantation in Ch. Agraharam. Her pet dog had followed her at the time. The dog returned on June 9 while the girl is still missing.

In their effort to trace the girl, police had brought a GPS collar from Hyderabad and put it around the dog’s neck on Friday, hoping it will help them trace the girl. But the dog died on Saturday.

Veterinary officers performed an autopsy of the dog at S. Annavaram in Tuni Mandal on Sunday, which revealed that it died due to dehydration. However, to make sure the cause of death, the dog’s body samples have been sent to the Forensic Lab in Visakhapatnam,

In the interim, on instructions of Deputy Chief Minister K. Pawan Kalyan, NDRF and HANUMAN teams have reached Ch. Agraharam hamlet to start looking for the girl afresh.

Already 500 personnel of various police teams have been searching for the girl for the past nine days. But they have found no clues.

Kakinada district superintendent of police G. Bindu Madhav has made tracing the girl’s whereabouts his top priority. He said the post-mortem had been performed on the dog to check whether it had been poisoned. However, the cause of death has been determined to be dehydration.

But the post-mortem has revealed a mild injury. The SP attributed the injury to a man who had hit the dog with a stone when it barked at him. At the time, both the dog and the girl had been together.

SP Madhav expressed the hope of tracing the girl soon.