Student's rape 'symbolic' of others
2012-12-31 10:47
New Dehli - One of hundreds of attacks
reported in New Delhi each year, the brutal gang rape and murder of a young
medical student in a private bus this month caught authorities and political
parties flat-footed, slow to appreciate it had become symbolic of all the others.
In the moments before the December 16 attack,
the 23-year-old woman from India's urban middle class, who had recently
qualified as a trainee physiotherapist in a private Delhi hospital, and her
male friend, a software engineer, were walking home from a cinema at a shopping
mall in south Delhi, according to a police reconstruction of events.
A bus, part of a fleet of privately owned
vehicles used as public transport across the city of 16 million, and known as
India's "rape capital", was at the same time heading toward them.
Earlier that day, it had ferried school students but was now empty except for
five men and a teenage boy, including its crew, police said. Most of the men
were from the city's slums.
One of the six - all now charged with murder
- lured the couple onto the bus, promising to drop the woman home, police have
said, quoting from an initial statement that she gave from her hospital bed
before her condition deteriorated rapidly.
A few minutes into the ride, her friend, 28,
grew suspicious when the bus deviated from the supposed route and the men
locked the door, according to her statement. They then taunted her for being
out with a man late at night, prompting the friend to intervene and provoking
an initial scuffle.
Raped for nearly an hour
The attackers then beat him with a metal rod,
knocking him unconscious, before turning on the woman who had tried to come to
his defence. Police say the men admitted after their arrest to torturing and
raping the student "to teach her a lesson".
At one point, the bus driver gave the wheel
to another of the accused and dragged the woman by the neck to the back of the
vehicle and forced himself upon her. The other five then took turns raping her
and also driving the bus, keeping it circling through the busy streets of
India's capital city, police said.
The woman was raped for nearly an hour before
the men pushed a metal rod inside her, severely damaging her internal organs,
and then dumped both her and her friend on the roadside, 8km from where they
had boarded it, police said.
Robbed of their clothes and belongings, they
were found half naked, bleeding and unconscious later that night by a passerby,
who alerted the police.
Role model
The woman, whose identity has been withheld
by police, gave her statement to a sub-divisional magistrate on December 21 in
the intensive care unit of Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital, according to local
media reports. She was undergoing multiple surgical procedures and her
condition later began to rapidly worsen.
Ten days after the attack and still in a
critical condition, she was flown to Singapore for specialist treatment. She
died in Singapore's Mount Elizabeth Hospital two days later. Her body was flown
back to Delhi and cremated there on Sunday in a private ceremony.
Family members who had accompanied her to
Singapore declined to speak to reporters, but relatives told the Times of India
newspaper she had been a role model to her two younger brothers.
Unlike most traditional Indian families who
only send their sons to fee-paying colleges or universities, her parents pinned
their hopes on the daughter and took loans to fund her studies.
She was born and brought up in a middle class
Delhi neighbourhood after her family moved to the city more than 20 years ago
from India's northern Uttar Pradesh state.
Her male friend recorded his statement to a
local court days after the attack and helped police identify the six accused.
He left for his hometown in Uttar Pradesh late on Saturday, missing the woman's
funeral, local media reported.
Shame, anger in slum
Four of the accused, all in custody, live in
the narrow by-lanes of Ravi Das Camp, a slum about 17km from the woman's home
in southwest Delhi. Inside the slum - home to some 1 200 people who eke out a
meagre living as rickshaw pullers and tea hawkers - many demanded the death
penalty for the accused.
"The incident has really shocked all of
us. I don't know how I will get my children admitted to a school. The incident
has earned a bad name to this place," said Pooja Kumari, a neighbour of
one of the accused.
Girija Shankar, a student, said: "Our
heads hang in shame because of the brutal act of these men. They must reap what
they have sown."
The house of one of the accused was locked,
with neighbours saying his family had left the city to escape the shame and
anger. Meena, a 45-year-old neighbour, said she had wanted to join the protests
that followed the rape, but was too scared.
"You never know when a mob may attack
this slum and attack our houses. But we want to say we're as angry as the
entire nation. We want them to be hanged," she said.
Two of the six alleged assailants come from
outside Delhi, according to police. One is married with children and was
arrested in his native village in Bihar state and the other, a juvenile, is a
runaway from a broken home in Uttar Pradesh.
In India, murder is punishable by death by
hanging, except in the case of offenders aged below 18.
Additional reporting by Suchitra Mohanty;
Editing by Mark Bendeich and Ian Geoghegan
