In a development that strengthened the prosecution’s evidence in the photojournalist gang-rape case, the victim and her male colleague on Friday identified the four of the five arrested accused at the Byculla prison in the presence of a Judicial Magistrate.
Two days after she identified the first accused in the case who is a “minor” lodged at Dongri remand home in south Mumbai, the city crime branch sleuths held a formal Test Identification Parade (TIP) at the Byculla prison, where the rape survivor identified the remaining four accused, Salim Ansari, Mohammed Kasim, Siraj Rehman Khan and Vijay Jadhav.
“At the TIP held in the presence of the Judicial Magistrate, court and prison officials, the four accused were made to stand along with others. The victim girl and her male colleague, who was also present at the scene of crime, identified the four accused. We are expecting a positive report from the magistrate,” a senior Crime Branch official said.
Informed Crime Branch sources said that the investigators had readied a make-shift enclosure at the Byculla prison - where the four accused had been lodged after a city court on Thursday remanded them in judicial custody till September 19 - to hold the TIP. “The crime branch officials were not present inside the make-shift enclosure, when the TIP was held,” the investigating officer said.
The photojournalist, working for a Mumbai events listing magazine, was gang-raped on the evening of August 22 by five men in the cover of tall grass and shrubs surrounding the dilapidated remains of the defunct Shakti Mills at Mahalaxmi in south-central Mumbai, where she had gone along with her male colleague to take pictures for a magazine story.
The five alleged culprits tied the victim girl’s male colleague up to a tree and with a belt and took her to an isolated place, where they perpetrated the sexual assault on her. They had fled the scene, after threatening the girl that they would post the photographs taken of her on their mobile phone on a social network site, if either she or colleague complained the matter to the police.
Sources said that with the conduct of a TIP, the crime branch sleuths had completed a major part of investigations in the case. The investigators had earlier matched the DNA samples of the accused with rape survivor’s vaginal swabs. In addition, the investigators have gathered both scientific and circumstantial evidences like call data records and layered Voice Analysis (lVA) of the recorded samples of the five arrested accused in the gang rape case
The lVA - a test carried out with the assistance of forensic experts from Gujarat - detects and measures the emotional content of human speech, captured live or extracted from recorded audio.