Teen remanded in custody for sexual assault of minor in Maharashtra

PUNE: A teenager (18) was remanded in custody of Pimprichinchwad police on Sunday by a local court on charges of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in Chinchwad. The accused is also a resident of Chinchwad. He has been remanded to custody till March 19, the police said.

The victim studies in class seven, and is a classmate of the accused’s brother. She visited the accused’s house on Friday, when his family members were away to attend a funeral at Mhada in Solapur district. The crime was committed at his place, the police said.

The incident came to light after her parents filed a kidnapping case at Pimpri police station around 2am on Saturday after she didn’t return home.

Hours after the case was registered, she returned home and told her parents that she was kidnapped, gagged and restrained by the accused at his house, which is next to hers.

“A female officer spoke with the victim and she told her that the two were in a relationship for the past six months. She must have been eleven-and-a-half years when the physical intimacy started. The medical examination has revealed no injuries on her body,” said police sub-inspector Y Shirsath of Mohannagar police outpost under Pimprichinchwad police station.

NEWDELHI: With reports emerging that the first case of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) was detected in China as early as November 17, 2019, Beijing should reveal more information about the virus behind the global health scourge. The world economy has come to a virtual standstill, and people are forced to live in isolation, largely because one of the most powerful countries in the world either chose to be in denial or actively muzzled information in the initial stages.

As some confusion lingers over the exact nature and origin of the disease, a Chinese government spokesperson last week appeared to blame the US military for the spread of contagion, immediately attracting diplomatic retaliation from the US State Department. Though many in China and other places have now said the spokesperson spoke out of turn, official communiques in the country are known to have a sanction from the Xi Jinping regime.

In any case, for prevention, the world needs to know the exact source of this contagion. The total number of affected are heading towards 165,000 with more than 6,000 deaths, and the virus has spread to large communities in Italy, France, Germany

and Spain.

The Chinese response to coronavirus was in two phases. First, it appeared to live in denial despite the numbers mounting in Hubei province late last year, and clamped down on contrarian voices.

This may have led to people from other countries getting affected and carrying the contagion to their countries of origin. The second phase was after China realised that it could not control the spread, and so it opened data and specifics of the disease to the world while locking down its own communities.

Professor K Vijayraghavan, principal scientific adviser to Narendra Modi government, told HT that the world has learnt two things from the Chinese responses to the virus. “Acknowledgement of a potential problem is best done speedily. China could, perhaps, have acted better, earlier. Second, act speedily to identify, test, contain, and manage. Hubei and China have done well here. India has analysed this and scenarios from other countries such as Iran,