India holds 4 after teen sisters raped, killed and hung on tree
Print Edition
A GROUP of men, including at least two police officers, raped and killed two teenage sisters in rural India then hung their bodies from a mango tree, authorities said yesterday, announcing the arrests of four men.
Villagers found the girls’ bodies hanging from the tree Wednesday morning, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state, police Superintendent Atul Saxena said. The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.
Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree for the rest of Wednesday, silently protesting alleged police inaction. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls’ bodies, preventing authorities from taking them down from the tree until the suspects were arrested.
Katra is 300 kilometers southwest of state capital, Lucknow.
Police arrested the four men later in the day and were searching for three more suspects.
Autopsies confirmed the girls had been gang-raped and strangled before being hung on the tree, Saxena said.
Villagers accused the chief of the local police station of ignoring a complaint by the girls’ father on Tuesday night that they were missing. The station chief has since been suspended.
The family belongs to the Dalit community, also called “untouchables,” the lowest rung in India’s caste system.
India tightened its anti-rape laws last year, making gang rape punishable by the death penalty, even in cases where the victim survives. The new laws came after the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in New Delhi that triggered nationwide protests.
Records show that a rape is committed every 22 minutes in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people.
Activists say that figure is lower than the true number, as a culture of tolerance of sexual violence leads many cases to go unreported. Women are often pressed by family or police to stay quiet about sexual assault, experts say, and those who do report cases are often subjected to ridicule or social stigma.
Last month, the head of Uttar Pradesh state’s governing party, the Samajwadi Party, told an election rally that the party was opposed to the law calling for gang rapists to be executed.
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