On Sunday, the police arrested Rashmi Mevada, a close friend of Daxa Shukla, at whose house Ruchi and some other children had been brought to take part in a religious ceremony.

Mevada had on Saturday told the police that Ruchi might have been sacrificed to appease Randal Ma, a deity with which the sacrifice of virgin girls has often been associated. She had said the body was buried in the Pethapur-Balva area.

The ceremony at Shukla's house was a Randal Ma pooja. Some 15 children brought by the driver and cleaner of the van in which Ruchi went to school had been fed after the ceremony.

Police teams found two clues they hope will lead to the detection of the crime. Acting on Mevada's information, police had searched the Pethapur-Balva region and the Khambhat highway. A police team found a single chappal in the Balva region, 25 km from Gandhinagar. It found another chappal (not yet matched with the first) and a child's undergarment in a Maruti van (GJ-1HH-5644) found abandoned on the Khambhat highway. There were bloodstains inside the van.

Police said the van was stolen from the Ellis Bridge area of Ahmedabad. Three-year-old Ruchi's parents will be asked if the undergarment was the one their child was wearing when she went missing.

The team also recovered a letter written by Jadeja which said that he had recorded ``all details in a cassette'', which is believed to have been hidden by Shukla.

A police team also searched the Ahmedabad house of Jaisukh Shah, a reporter with a Gujarati newspaper who is said to have dropped home the girls brought to Shukla's house for the ceremony. His Maruti was seized, and will be examined by forensic experts on Monday. Shah, who had refused to make a statement in the case, is absconding. Once again he has been summoned to present himself to police by 11 a.m. on Monday.

A senior investigating officer said some of the people involved in the case were putting police on the wrong trail. Teams sent to find the prime accused, Nilesh Jadeja, in Bhopal and the Kutch district had found nothing. He said that in fact, Jadeja was most probably hiding somewhere near Gandhinagar.

Senior police officers, including Inspector General Amitabh Pathak (Gandhinagar Range) and District Superintendent of Police R.S. Yadav, apprised Minister of State for Home Haren Pandya about the progress in the case.