ROURKELA: A 17-year-old girl was allegedly gangraped by three migrant workers in broad daylight at Talsara village under Dharuadihi police limits in Sundargarh district on Tuesday afternoon.
Within hours of the incident, police arrested the three accused, aged 23 to 25 years, from the same village on charges of sexually assaulting the teenage girl, who recently completed her Plus II.
Police said the girl had gone to her family farmland in the afternoon. After spending some time there, she went to the nearby Safei river for washing. At around 3.30 pm, the three accused caught the minor alone, forcefully carried her into the nearby bushes and allegedly gangraped her.
After the miscreants fled, the survivor returned home and narrated her ordeal to her parents, who subsequently reported the incident to the local police at around 7 pm.
After receiving information, Sundargarh SP Amritpal Kaur interacted with the girl, inspected the crime scene and formed multiple teams to nab the culprits. The SP said without waiting for formal registration of FIR, multiple police teams launched a coordinated operation and arrested the three accused by 9.30 pm.
Police said the three accused work in a fishing company in Goa and had returned to their village a month ago. They were supposed to return to Goa in a week. While two of the accused were illiterate, the third was barely able to write his name. The trio had allegedly threatened the survivor not to disclose the incident to anyone with the claim that the sexual assault was filmed in their mobile phone and they would circulate the video on social media.
Police said the purported video clip of the crime was not found in the accused’s mobile phones. Efforts are on to ascertain if the video was deleted or if it was a hoax threat.
Kaur said the accused were booked under sections 70(2), 77 and 351(2) of BNS and section 6 of POCSO Act. They were produced in court on Wednesday evening and remanded in judicial custody.