Lynchings ‘may be honour killing’

NEW DELHI — Two teenage cousins found hanging from a mango tree after being kidnapped, gang-raped and lynched, may in fact have been murdered in an honour killing by members of their own family, police in India have suggested.

Photographs of the low caste girls, who were 14 and 15, hanging from the tree, provoked a worldwide outcry over the scale of sexual violence in India and atrocities suffered by its lower castes and “untouchables.” Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretarygeneral, voiced his horror.

The girls had been walking to a nearby field to go to the toilet one evening last month when they were alleged to have been seized by five men, raped, strangled and hung from a tree.

Three suspects have been arrested along with two police officers who refused to help the victims’ families when they first reported their daughters missing. Two more suspects are on the run.

The state government in Uttar Pradesh, where the killings took place, has been accused of tolerating lawlessness and criticized over insensitive comments made by its political leaders.

But the head of police for the region has claimed the atrocity may not be as it first appeared. Just one of the girls had been raped and the five men sought for their murder may be innocent, he said.

The victims had in fact been strangled before their bodies were strung up on the tree, he added. Anand Lal Bannerjee said the girls’ relations and witnesses in the case would now be made to undergo “narco-analysis,” whereby they will be questioned while under the influence of “truth drugs.” Their telephone records will also be examined.