INDIA: DALIT TEEN GANG-RAPED, KILLED IN HARYANA
A 15-year-old Dalit
girl who went missing last week in the Indian state of Haryana has been found
dead near a canal in Jind district, nearly 100km west of the capital New Delhi.
Doctors say she was
gang-raped and her body was mutilated, bringing the memory of the 2012 brutal
gang rape of a medical student in New Delhi whose death had triggered
nation-wide protests.
"On the
afternoon of January 9, she had left for tuition classes, as usual. When I went
to pick her up at 8pm (2:30 GMT), the teacher informed me that she had not
arrived that day. She was nowhere to be found. Around 10pm that night we filed
a police complaint," the father of the victim told.
If the police had done their job on the day she went missing, my daughter would have been alive, nothing bad would have happened to herVICTIM'S FATHER
"If the police
had done their job on the day she went missing, my daughter would have been
alive, nothing bad would have happened to her," the 39-year-old said.
Police are
questioning several people in connection with the case.
"We have detained
a few people on the basis of doubt. We have not arrested them yet. We are
interrogating them now," Abhishek Garg, superintendent of police in
Haryana’s Kurukshetra district, told .
"The probe is
still on. We are trying to ascertain the role of the boy who was named in the
FIR (first information report). We are trying to find out if there are any
accomplices," Garg said.
Dr SK Dattarwal,
senior professor at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Rohtak,
Haryana, where the post-mortem was carried out, said the girl from Jhansa
village in Kurukshetra district was gang-raped.
"She was
probably sexually assaulted by more than two persons. They might have tried to
thrust some object in her vagina also. Her liver was found ruptured. The
injuries were all around the body, on the face, neck, lips and chest. It
appears that the victim had struggled a lot to escape from the sexual assault,”
Dattarwal told the Indian Express newspaper.
Spike in child rape
The case has brought
the spotlight back on to what women's groups call a rape epidemic in the
country.
The 2012 gang rape
had drawn international attention to violence against women and forced the
government to introduce tougher anti-rape laws, including the death penalty.
According to
National Crime Records Bureau data for 2016, incidents of rape of children in
India increased by over 82 percent compared with 2015.
In 2016, police in
India registered 38,947 rape complaints, an increase of 12.4 percent from the
previous year.
The victim, a
student in the 10th grade, was cremated on Sunday.
"Her mother
can't stop crying; she is still in shock. My soul is shattered at the thought
of what my daughter went through. Those animals inserted an iron rod in her
vagina and damaged her internal organs. My daughter was like a flower, I can't
imagine why they hurt her like this," the father said while sobbing.
"She was very
studious; she wanted to become a doctor."
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
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