NEW DELHI: “If ever life gives me an opportunity to come in front of them (accused), I will shoot them dead,” said the battered and broken husband of the gang-raped woman and father of the 14-year-old daughter on Monday. Both mother and daughter were dragged out of their car by dacoits near a highway in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr on the intervening night of Friday and Saturday when they were travelling with other family members to their hometown in Shahjahanpur to attend a family ritual.
The assailants placed the woman and daughter next to each other in front her husband and other family members, and gang-raped them. Both mother and daughter were screaming and looking at each other when their clothes were torn off simultaneously. When the incident happened, the woman tried to reach out to her daughter though she was facing the same barbaric ordeal, the husband told Express.
He said, “I begged them to spare my daughter and my wife and take all our belongings but they kept hitting us with iron rods while we were helplessly listening to the screams.”
“You cannot understand how I felt when my wife and daughter were beaten and gang-raped in front of my eyes. I would request the government and judiciary to allow our women to shoot the culprits in public,” he pleaded in a choked voice. Meanwhile, the Utttar Pradesh police arrested three accused identified as Rais Khan, Jabar and Shahbaz — all in their late twenties — for the gruesome act and produced them before the court which sent them to judicial custody. Surprisingly, police did not seek custody of the accused for further investigation.
“The trio has been remanded in judicial custody for 14 days by a Bulandshahr court,” said Inspector General (law and order) Hare Ram Sharma.
Gold ornaments of the victims and Rs. 5,500 cash were recovered from the accused, he said, adding a request would be made for trial by a fast-track court.
Sharma said, “Seven to eight more names have come up and police have constituted six teams to nab them.”
The National Commission for Women has slammed the police for not including sections of The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO Act) 2012 in the FIR.
National Commission for Women (NCW) chairperson Lalitha Kumaramangalam said the family told the NCW team, which met the victims in Bulandshahr, that when the girl was taken for medical examination “she was abused by the doctor, who asked her a number of awkward questions and berated her”.
“Both the girl and her mother are severely traumatised. The NCW has offered counselling to the victims,” she said.