Second teen burnt after rape
INDIAN police have arrested 14 people suspected of kidnapping, raping and burning to death a teenage girl, the latest in rising crimes against women in India despite toughening of laws.
District magistrate Jitendera Singh said the accused abducted the girl from Chatra, a village in eastern Jharkhand state, while she was attending a wedding ceremony on Thursday. Some of them allegedly raped her before letting her go home.
The village council leaders imposed a fine of 50 000 rupees (R9 300) on the accused the next day.
Singh said the suspects beat up the girl’s family members for complaining against them and burned her to death after finding her at home alone on Friday.
In a separate case in the same state, also on Friday, a 17-year-old girl was raped and set on fire and is now battling for her life.
A 19-year-old man has been arrested in connection with this incident.
“The girl was alone at her relative’s home in a village in Pakur district when a man from the neighbourhood sexually assaulted her,” district spokesperson Pramod Kumar Jha said by phone.
“He later poured kerosene on her and set her ablaze and fled from the scene,” he said. The victim was admitted to hospital with serious burn injuries.
India has been shaken by a series of sexual assaults since 2012, when a student was gang-raped and murdered on a moving New Delhi bus. That attack galvanised a country where widespread violence against women had long been quietly accepted.
While the 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.
Responding to widespread outrage over the recent rape and killings of young girls and other attacks on children, India’s government last month approved the death penalty for people convicted of raping children under age 12.
India’s Supreme Court on Monday ordered the trial of eight men accused of the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl to be moved to another state after her family and lawyer said they faced death threats.
The girl, from a nomadic Muslim community that roams the forests of Indian Kashmir, was drugged, held captive in a Hindu temple and sexually assaulted for a week before being strangled and battered to death with a stone in January.
Her case caused a wave of revulsion around the country but also exposed communal divisions after two former ministers of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party joined a rally in support of the eight accused, saying they were innocent. All of the accused are Hindus. One is a retired local government official and two are police officers.
A bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra said the trial would be held in Pathankot in the neighbouring state of Punjab, and in camera, so that witnesses could be assured of protection.
“We are transferring the case to Pathankot from Kathua for a fair trial,” the court said in its order. The case will be heard daily so that an early verdict can be reached, in a country where such cases can run for years, or even decades.
The Kathua case reignited memories of the similarly brutal gang rape of a woman on a Delhi bus in 2012 who later died of her injuries.
The 2012 case also led to the toughening of laws to deter crimes against women, but a rape epidemic shows no sign of dying down in part because investigation of such crimes is still inadequate and convictions rare. Often the accused are powerful.
“The basic concern is fair trial. That is the reason the court said there will be dayto-day hearing,” said Deepika Singh Rajawat, lawyer for the girl’s family, who cannot be identified under Indian law.
Rajawat had said she faced the risk of personal attack for taking up the case of the girl. – AP/Reuters/DPA