An 11-year-old girl sleeping rough with her family on a pavement in the Indian capital was abducted, raped and murdered by a taxi driver on Monday, police said.

The incident took place in south Delhi’s Mehrauli area in the early hours.

Police have arrested a suspect they identified as Bablu, who they accused of kidnapping the 11-year-old. Police allege the driver took her to an isolated spot, assaulted and murdered her, and then dumped her body in a forested stretch along a highway outside the city.

The girl’s family contacted police at around 7am after failing to locate her near where they slept.

The suspect was arrested later on Monday after police reviewed CCTV footage from the area.

“The accused, a cab driver in his early 30s and a native of Bihar, abducted the girl at around 5am when she was asleep with her family. A case of kidnapping was registered immediately and a large-scale search operation was launched. During CCTV footage checking, police got to know about the cab driver,” a senior police officer told the PTI news agency.

An investigator told the Hindustan Times that while they were yet to establish the sequence of events, they “suspected the accused had decided to drop the minor back to the Mehrauli area but, after seeing police, he fled with her”.

“The girl was alive but he took her to the forest area in Mehrauli and strangled her to death,” the officer said.

Technical surveillance and CCTV analysis played a crucial role in leading to an arrest, the Telegraph quoted a police official as saying.

Acting on the suspect’s disclosure following his arrest, police said they recovered the girl’s body from the place where it was dumped and subsequently sent samples for forensic analysis.

Police also said they were looking into the criminal record of the suspect and investigating whether he acted alone or had help.