13-yr-old raped four times by 9 men in MP

A 13-year-old girl was raped four times by nine different men over the course of three days after she was abducted in Madhya Pradesh’s Umaria last week, officials said.

Umaria superintendent of police (SP) Vikas Shahwal said the girl, a Class 9 student, had come to Umaria from Jabalpur to meet her mother on January 10. The next day, she met two men, who police identified as Akash Singh and Rahul Kushwaha, in a market, who asked her to join them for a lunch.

One of the persons was known to her, an official said.

“They took the girl to a forest and gang-raped her,” said Shahwal. After the act, the duo reached a dhaba where they held her hostage for the entire night. Later, Dhaba owner Paras Soni and four others also raped her. “The girl requested the accused to allow her to go. She sent to her home in a truck,” the SP said.

However, the trauma did not end there. After the minor shared the incident with her the truck driver, indentified as Rohit Yadav, he also raped her and left her near a toll plaza on the Umaria-Katni road. “She flagged down another truck and the unidentified driver, too, raped her. The girl somehow reached her home on January 13,” he added.

The girl’s mother lodged a police complaint the next day and the victim’s statement was recorded, an official said.

The Madhya Pradesh Police on Saturday arrested eight people —Singh, Kushwaha, Soni, Yadav and Manu Kewat, Onkar Rai, Eitendra Singh and Rajnish Choudhary — and charged them under section 376(d) (gang rape) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and under relevant section of Protection of Children from Sexual Offence (Pocso) Act.