New Delhi: Police in India have arrested 12 people, including eight women and three minor boys, over alleged sexual assault and parading of a young woman in the streets of capital New Delhi.
Police told Al Jazeera the three minors are accused of sexually assaulting the woman, who is in her 20s, in a neighbourhood in the city’s east as India celebrated its Republic Day on January 26.
Police said the young woman was allegedly gang-raped, her hair chopped off by the women of the house where she was attacked and her face blackened.
A video of the attack, available on social media, shows the victim being brutally slapped and kicked by the women as others in the house clap and cheer. The attack continues for several minutes as the woman pleads for mercy, her body crouched and hands folded.
After the beating, she was dragged out of the house and paraded in the narrow lanes of the neighbourhood, with a garland of discarded slippers hung around her neck. Videos of the incident show a crowd of people watching the assault that took place right before the woman’s paternal house.
The police arrived and rescued the woman. “She is in a government shelter home. We are providing security to her family,” senior police official R Sathiyasundaram told Al Jazeera over the telephone.
Demonstrators protest after the death of a rape victim, in New Delhi Demonstrators protest after the death of a rape victim near India Gate in New Delhi [File: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters]
Local media reports said the attack took place because the woman, mother of a three-year-old child, had repeatedly rejected the advances of a teenager who lived next to her parent’s house in the city’s Kasturba Nagar area.
The 16-year-old boy’s family claims he killed himself following the rejection in November last year. Reports said the teen’s death caused the purported “revenge attack”.
“The boy committed suicide in November last year and his family is now blaming the victim. They have alleged it was because of her that he took the extreme step. To exact revenge on her, they allegedly abducted her. They wanted to teach her a lesson,” several media reports quoted a senior police official as saying last week.
The woman’s sister, whose identity cannot be revealed for legal reasons, told a local news website the teen who died had “fallen in love” with the victim. “He used to keep calling and asking her to leave her husband and be with him. She would always refuse,” she told newslaundry.com. Al-Jazeera
