Indian girl says she was raped by same 5 men 3 years apart
Haryana, India -- A 20-year-old Indian college student has allegedly been gang raped again by the five men who raped her three years ago.
"I was leaving college when I saw them. They were the same five men. They forced me into the car and tried to strangulate me. They said they would kill my father and brother. I don't know where they took me," the woman told an Indian TV channel.
The five men left her seriously injured in the bushes. A passerby saw her and informed the police, after which she was taken to a hospital.
The incident happened in Rohtak town of Indian state of Haryana on July 13. A week on, the girl is still under treatment in a hospital.
Haryana Police have arrested three of the five accused so far. They will be produced in court today.
"One more who has been named will be arrested soon. Address of the fifth accused is not clear. As soon as we ascertain his address, we will arrest him," Haryana Police chief KP Singh told the press on Tuesday.
The girl from a low-caste Dalit family was first raped by the same men in the nearby town of Bhiwani in 2013. Police had arrested two of them but later let them off on bail. The girl's family had to leave the town after threats by the families of the accused.
The girl's family says the men had found out that the family has shifted to Rohtak and were building pressure on them to withdraw the case from court. The accused had reportedly offered $75,000 to the victim as an out of court "settlement money" - an offer rejected by the girl.
"We had filed a case in the court for the arrest of the three accused and the cancellation of the bail of the other two. We were getting constant threats to strike an out-of-court deal, but we remained firm. That's why they attacked her again," the girl's brother told reporters.
This case comes nearly four years after the gang rape of a 23-year-old medical student on a bus in Delhi sparked massive outrage and invited global attention to India's struggles tackling a sexual assault crisis. Despite several measures, including tougher laws, taken after the Delhi gang rape of December 2012, the rapes haven't stopped. As per the latest figures of India's National Crime Records Bureau, India witnessed an average of over 100 rapes per day in 2014.
Activists say the number of actual rapes would be much more because most rapes go unreported.