Bihar shelter home: 29 rapes confirmed
PATNA: Bihar police on Tuesday confirmed that 29 girls had been raped at a state-funded short-stay shelter home in Muzaffarpur even as they ruled out a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the alleged rapes.
Staff and other government officials were accused of raping over 30 girls for months at the shelter home. The police had dug up the home’s compound amid allegations that a girl had been killed and buried there. But nothing was found.
State police chief K S Dwivedi said 42 out of the 44 girls rescued from the shelter home on May 30 were medically examined. He added 29 of them were found to have been sexually assaulted.
Dwivedi ruled out the possibility of recommending a CBI inquiry, saying he was satisfied with the investigation.
Earlier in the day, Union home minister Rajnath Singh said he was open to a CBI inquiry if the state government recommended it. Opposition parties raised the issue in the Lok Sabha with Congress member Ranjeet Ranjan demanding a CBI probe.
The leader of Opposition in the Bihar assembly Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, who had demanded a CBI probe under the high court’s supervision, criticised the state government for rejecting it.
He alleged complicity of ruling Janata Dal (United) leaders and wondered why the state government was opposed to an impartial CBI probe if the Centre was willing to order one.
JD(U) spokesman Neeraj Kumar questioned Yadav’s demand, asking what lapses had he found in the police investigation to seek a CBI probe.
“All the accused were arrested within 72 hours. The government itself took cognisance of the matter on basis of a social audit report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS),” he said.
The matter surfaced after TISS carried out a social audit of government homes across Bihar in 2017 and pointed to sexual abuse of minors in Muzaffarpur.