Uttar Pradesh villagers demand justice after rape and murder of low-caste girls

A 16-YEAR-OLD Indian girl allegedly gang-raped and set on fire by two men has died in hospital, police said on Tuesday (20).

The girl was a dalit, the lowest rung in the Hindu caste system.

Her death on Monday (19) came days after two dalit sisters, aged 15 and 17, were found

hanging from a tree after being allegedly sexually assaulted and murdered by six men.

Both incidents took place in Uttar Pradesh state.

In the latest case, the girl from a rural area was allegedly attacked by two men and set on fire early this month. She was shifted to a hospital in the state capital Lucknow, where she succumbed to her injuries on Monday, police said.

“We arrested the accused within two hours of the incident being reported and assured the family of proper follow-up action against the perpetrators,” local police chief Dinesh Kumar Prabhu said.

Prabhu added that police had since been deployed around the girl’s house “to check any untoward incident”.

In the previous incident, local police chief Sanjiv Suman said the men had last Wednesday (14) lured the girls to a field where they sexually assaulted them and then “killed them by strangling them with their scarves”.

Scores of locals, including the family of the teenagers, held protests near their village in Uttar Pradesh, demanding swift punishment for the accused.

One of the main suspects, a neighbour of the girls, was arrested following a firefight with police when he was shot in the leg.

An autopsy report confirmed sexual assault and asphyxiation as the cause of death, Suman said.

Last year, the Uttar Pradesh authorities’ swift cremation before an autopsy of a Dalit rape victim killed by an upper-caste Hindu man triggered outrage.

In previous cases, low-caste families have been threatened or attacked to stop them testifying.