Shelter for vulnerable women shut amid reports of 11 occupants going missing

POLICE IN eastern India have sealed a shelter for women amid reports that 11 of them are missing.

Another shelter run by the same charity, Seva Sanklap Ewam Vikas Samiti, was closed in June after dozens of girls said they had been raped there.

The charity’s director and nine of his employees have been arrested on rape charges.

The second shelter was sealed on Tuesday, said police officer Anil Kumar Singh.

Both shelters – one for women, the other for girls aged seven to 17 – are in the town of Muzzafarpur, some 70 kilometres (40 miles) outside of Patna, the capital of Bihar state.

Workers from the state Social Welfare Department reported the women missing on Monday, Mr Singh said.

The state handed over investigation of the case to the federal government after a wave of protests and demands by the political opposition and human rights groups.

Media reports say the charity received about 150,000 dollars per year from the state and federal governments to run shelters for women and girls.

Brajesh Thakur, who has run the group since 1987, has been held since early June, when authorities raided the girls’ shelter.

The Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences found evidence of trouble during an audit of the charity earlier this year.

State investigators then interviewed girls at the shelter, many of whom said they had been raped.

India has been shaken by a series of high-profile sexual assaults since 2012, when a young woman was fatally gang-raped on a moving New Delhi bus.

That attack sparked protests calling for more protection for women, and harsher punishments for their attackers.

Since then, India’s parliament has doubled prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalised voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women.