India gang-rape victim’s friend recounts attack

NEW DELHI — Passers-by refused to stop to help a naked, bleeding, gang-rape victim after she was dumped from a bus onto a New Delhi street, and police delayed taking her to a hospital for 30 minutes, the woman’s male companion said in an interview. It was his first public account of the gruesome attack that killed the 23-year-old student and prompted demands for reform of a law enforcement culture seen as lax in crimes against women.

The gang-rape victim’s brother blamed a delay in medical treatment of nearly two hours for her death last week in a Singapore hospital.

The woman’s male companion, who has not been named, sat in a wheelchair with a broken leg in his interview aired Friday on Indian TV station Zee News. He recounted the 2 1/2 hour rape and beating by a group of men on a bus, which the pair had boarded as they were returning from seeing a movie together.

“I gave a tough fight to three of them. I punched them hard. But then two others hit me with an iron rod,” he said. The woman tried to call the police using her mobile phone, but the men took it away from her, he said. They then took her to the rear seats of the bus and one-by-one began raping her, beating and violating her with an iron rod.

Afterward, he overheard some of the attackers saying the woman was dead before dumping both onto the street, he said.

On Saturday, police officer Vivek Gogia denied the companion’s assertion that police officers debated jurisdiction for 30 minutes before taking the rape victim and her friend to a hospital.

In a statement, Gogia said police vans reached the spot where the rape victim and her friend were dumped within three minutes of receiving the alert. “Police vans left the spot for hospital with the victims within 12 minutes,” he said.

That time was spent in borrowing bed sheets from a neighboring hotel to cover the naked rape victim and her friend, he said.

Also Saturday, a court asked police to produce five men accused of raping the student for pre-trial proceedings on Monday. Police have charged them with murder, rape and other crimes that could bring them the death penalty.

A sixth suspect, listed as a 17-year-old, was expected to be tried in a juvenile court, where the maximum sentence would be three years in a reform facility.

Prosecutor Rajiv Mohan said the summary received from Mount Eliza- beth Hospital in Singapore said the rape victim’s death was caused by septicemia and multiple-organ failure, the Press Trust of India news agency said.

He also told Magistrate Namrita Aggarwal that the DNA test confirmed that the blood of the victim tallied with the blood stains found on the clothes of all the accused.

Meanwhile, the rape victim’s brother said the delay in providing medical treatment led to complications which perhaps caused her death.

“She told me that after the incident she had asked passers-by for help but to no avail, and it was only after the highway patrol alerted the police that she was rushed to hospital, but it had taken almost two hours,” the Press Trust of India quoted the brother as saying.

The 23-year-old woman died last weekend from massive internal injuries suffered during the attack.

On the night of the attack, the woman and her companion had just finished watching the movie “Life of Pi” at an upscale mall and were looking for a ride home. An autorickshaw driver declined to take them, so they boarded the private bus with the six assailants inside, the companion told Zee News.

After the pair were on the bus for a while, the men started harassing and attacking them.