less than a month after a 16-year-old girl was gang-raped by three men at a public park in Northwest Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh area on December 16 last year, the Delhi Police has arrested all the three accused.
Confirming the arrests, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Northwest) Aslam Khan said, “The arrested accused — identified as Shivprasad, alias Babua (33), Arun Yadav (36) and Kamlesh (28) — were roaming in the park on the evening of December 16 after consuming liquor when they spotted the victim with her male friend. They raped her, thrashed her friend and fled away.”
Talking about how the 20 teams worked diligently, the officer said that the police teams used to interrogate hundreds of people. Going old school, they went around the area, took out compendiums of criminals. “There came a time when the team disguised in civilian clothes entered the slums of the Shalimar Bagh area. It was while talking to the locals that one of the teams got to know about the accused Babua, a resident of the jhuggis. On Thursday night, he was arrested. at his instance, Arun and Rakesh were arrested.
Rakesh was arrested from Varanasi in a late night operation and was remanded to Delhi.
Prasad is an accused in another rape case that of a minor, reported in 2013. Police said that the minor girl was gang-raped in a park while her male friend was beaten up and their mobile phones were robbed allegedly by three men.
The incident took place last year on December 16, the day that marked five years since the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student on a moving bus in Delhi.
After the arrests, the police also said they have given a clean chit to the gang rape victim’s male friend and made it clear that neither was he involved nor did he know any of the three victims.
This is contrary to some of the statements earlier provided by the police in the first few days after the incident where they had said that there were inconsistencies in the version of the 19-year-old man and that they suspected he could have known the accused.
“Of the arrested men, Shiv Prasad is an auto driver, Arun Yadav is a distributor of pesticides, Kamlesh is school drop-out,” a senior officer said.