India – Two teenagers gang raped one commits suicide #Vaw

NEW DELHI: Two teenagers have been gang raped in separate incidents in India in the past four days, highlighting a rape epidemic that shows no sign of abating despite tougher penalties introduced last month.

Police said they had not made any arrests in either case.

The girl was grabbed while she was home alone, according to the news outlet.

The men, from the same village, showed up on two bikes and in a car and forced the girl to a desolate road around midnight Sunday, the report said. Following the attack, they left her outside her home.

A cousin found her outside later and the girl’s father filed a complaint with police. Sources told the Times, however, that the suspects come from “influential families” and tried to get the girl’s father to drop the case, leading to a fight.

On Monday afternoon, the girl’s family found her dead inside their home.

“We are blaming ourselves for leaving her alone. We want the accused to be given the death penalty,” the girl’s father told the Times of India.

No arrests have been made in the attack, but a police official vowed “our teams are on the job to nab the accused,” according to the report.

“The accused are absconding but they will be put behind the bars at the earliest,” inspector Jaibhan Tyagi said.

On Tuesday, a 19-year-old woman was raped by five men, including the driver of an autorickshaw she hailed in another district of the same state.

A 19-year-old woman was allegedly gang-raped by an auto-rickshaw driver, who gave her a lift, and four other men in Bhondsi area of Gurugram on Tuesday evening, police said on Thursday.

The Gururgram police on Thursday arrested the auto-rickshaw driver, who was identified as Akash Kumar, 22. The auto-rickshaw used in crime was also recovered from him.

Raids are being conducted for the arrest of remaining four accused, the police said.

The woman told the police that around 8pm she was waiting for a bus to Aligarh at Sohna bus stand when the auto-rickshaw driver asked her where she wanted to go.

According to the victim, the driver told her the bus to Aligarh had left and that she could take a train from Gurugram, while offering her a lift. She agreed to take the lift.

After a few minutes, the driver took a turn towards Raisina Stone Crushing Zone and did not stop despite her protests.

“The accused stopped the vehicle at a secluded spot where there were a lot of bushes and four other persons were waiting there. The accused caught hold of me and they took turns to rape me. When I tried to fight them off, they pinned down my hands and legs,” the victim told the police in her statement.

Police said that when the victim fell unconscious, the driver poured some water on her face. They also threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the rape.

The woman reached the Sohna police station after seeking help from few locals.The woman also told the police the name of one of the men they were calling out during the assault.

A case was registered at Bhondsi police station after the woman lodged a complaint on Wednesday. The number of crime against women in Gurugram has been rising. Last year, the police filed 135 cases of rape up from 131 in 2016.

Gurugram, on the southwest outskirts of New Delhi, is a rapidly expanding satellite town, where scores of international companies have set up offices due to its role as an industrial, financial and technology hub.

Media reports said the 16-year-old girl was abducted from her home when she was alone and raped by men from her village. The victim hanged herself on Monday and the police has registered a case of rape, kidnapping and abetment of suicide though the perpetrators had not been caught.

The incidents come less than a month after India approved the death penalty for the rape of girls younger than 12, and increased the prison term for the rape of older girls and women following nationwide disgustover a particularly gruesome rape and murder of a Muslim girl in Jammu & Kashmir state.

Registered cases of sexual violence have been steadily rising despite the national outrage that followed the fatal gang rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi in 2012.

Amid the wave of anger at that time, the government promised to speed up rape trials, introduce harsher penalties, including the death sentence in extreme cases, and introduced a law against stalking.

But statistics show that since 2012, reported rape cases climbed 60 per cent to about 40,000 in 2016, with child rape accounting for about 40 per cent of them.

(Reporting by Malini Menon Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore, Robert Birsel)