More men could be involved, say police.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW DELHI: Police have arrested eight men suspected of gang raping, and brutally murdering a 28-year-old woman from Nepal, who was visiting her sister in Rohtak, Haryana.
Another suspect committed suicide by consuming a poisonous substance before he could be apprehended by the police, said reports.
Haryana’s Director General of Police Yashpal Singhal said police became suspicious of 9 men from Gaddhi Kheri village who were in touch with each other on February 1, after studying details of mobile phone calls in the area, reported The Hindustan Times.
“Upon being questioned after they were rounded up, the suspects revealed that they had taken turns with the victim at 7pm on February 1 at an abandoned room in the fields of one Ram Niwas, one kilometer from where her body was found,” Singhal said.
The arrested men, aged between 18 and 37, belonged to Gaddi Kheri village, located six kilometers from Rohtak.
Singhal said police believed some more persons could have been involved in the crime, and the investigation was on. On Monday, the police had enhanced the reward for information about persons who attacked the woman from Rs1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh.
The victim, who was reportedly mentally challenged, was living with her sister at Chinyot Colony in Rohtak while undergoing treatment at a hospital. Her sister was working as a domestic help in the city. Three days after she was reported missing, her mutilated body was found in a field. An autopsy confirmed rape and multiple injuries to the head, chest and thighs. The woman’s body was found without key organs.
The autopsy report stated that blades, sticks, stones and condoms had been shoved into the body, said doctors of the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak. Dr S K Dhattarwal, who led the team that performed the autopsy, said the woman was attacked so brutally that her private parts were torn, and her intestines were damaged.
Dhatterwal said he has supervised or conducted around 30,000 autopsies, but has never seen such brutality in his 29-year career, reported The Times of India, earlier.
He said two stones were inserted into the slain woman’s anus. “Her face was eaten by animals; her lungs and heart were found missing. Also, her skull had fractured and there were injury marks on both her thighs and chest,” he said.
Doctors took five hours to conduct the autopsy. “There was a 16cm long and 4cm wide stick-like article in her vagina. We presume that a longer stick was used and it may have broken inside her. We also found a number of condoms in her vagina,” Dhatterwal was quoted as saying by the Times.
India is still to recover from the horror of the Nirbhaya gang rape case in December, 2012, when a student was gang raped on a moving bus in Delhi, brutalized with an iron rod inserted in her vagina, and thrown off the bus. She died from her injuries.
Despite national outrage and protests on the streets of cities in India after the Nirbhaya gang rape case, the spate of crimes against women has been unabated in the country.
Recently, a 15-year-old girl was gang raped by three minors in Agra, Rajasthan, and the video of the crime circulated on WhatsApp. The crime surfaced only two days after another heinous crime took place in Sambhal district, where a college student was abducted and raped by four men. That crime was uploaded on YouTube by the perpetrators.
The Times reported earlier that Sunitha Krishnan, an anti-trafficking activist based in Hyderabad begun a campaign called ‘shame the rapists’ on the internet. She had posted photographs of six alleged rapists, after having seen a video that a friend had forwarded to her. Her car was vandalized soon after. The rapists of that unidentified crime are still at large.