Six accused still at large
In a case where the Diwali festival turned out to be a nightmare for a teenager, a 16-year-old girl was gang-raped allegedly by four of her friends at Goregaon’s Santosh Nagar locality in north Mumbai on Friday night.
Acting on a complaint registered by the victim girl, the Dindoshi police have booked a case against six boys — all in their 20s — under Section 376 (D) of the IPC for the alleged gang-rape and are looking for the accused, who are absconding.
“The victim has told us that four of the six boys had allegedly raped her, while two the remaining two abetted the crime. We have registered the offence against all the six boys. We know the identities of all six of them. Our records reveal that four of the six boys were involved in petty crimes like burglary and theft,” Jayawant Mane of the Dindhoshi police station said.
According to the police, two of the boys invited the girl to a flat, shared by four of their friends, for a puja held on Friday evening on the occasion of Dhanteras. After the puja, the boys offered to drop her home. However, they took her to a nearly isolated place — an empty drainage tunnel — and allegedly raped her, after spiking her soft drink.
Though she returned home on Friday night, the girl chose to keep quiet till Saturday. However, she broke down on Sunday and narrated to her grandmother the chain of events that led to her sexual assault.
Accompanied by her grandmother and a local social worker, the victim on Sunday, went to the Dindoshi police station, where she formally lodged a complaint against the six boys.
Having registered an FIR, the city police have formed a special team to track down and arrest the six culprits behind the gang-rape.
This is the third gang-rape after the much-discussed gang-rapes that have took place in the defunct Shakti Mill premises at Mahalaxmi in south Mumbai on July 31 and August 22, 2013.
In the August 22 incident which was reported first, a 22-year-old photo-journalist, working for a Mumbai events listing magazine, was gang-raped 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.
In the first incident, the victim girl — who works as a telephone operator with a private firm at Bhandup and lives at Mulund in north-east Mumbai — had gone to Mahalaxmi on July 31, along with her boyfriend, for some work. She and her friend were passing through the Shakti mill area — a short-cut to reach to the other end from the Mahalaxmi railway station, when the accused accosted the duo. like in the photojournalist gang-rape case, the quintet tied up the victim’s male friend to a tree and gang-raped her.
Incidentally, three of the five accused involved in the earlier two incidents are the same. With the police having filed the charge-sheets in the two cases, the trial has already begun in both the cases. Unlike in the earlier two cases, the accused in the November 1 case was known to the victim.