Girl (4) ‘gang-raped in Indian hospital’
POLICE in India are investigating allegations a four-yearold girl was gang-raped while being treated in an intensive care unit at a hospital in the country’s north.
Local police official Mahesh Srivastava said the girl told her grandmother she was raped by a hospital attendant and four others when she was alone on Saturday night.
He said one man was in custody and police were looking for others. Police also have asked for CCTV footage and are trying to determine why the girl had been left alone.
The girl had been in the hospital for four days and was being treated for a snake bite.
The hospital is 250km southwest of Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
India has been shaken by a series of sexual assaults in recent years, including the gang-rape and murder of a student on a moving New Delhi bus in 2012.
That attack galvanised a country where widespread violence against women had long been quietly accepted.
While the Indian government has passed a series of laws increasing punishment for rape of an adult to 20 years in prison, it’s rare for more than a few weeks to pass without another brutal sexual assault being reported.