BHOPAL: A concocted abduction and gang-rape story by a 19-year-old B.Com student kept the cops busy for around 20 hours in Madhya Pradesh’s largest and most populated city of Indore.
Amid four cases of gruesome crime against women (three of them against 13-year-old girls) in the state over the last ten days, the Indore police got an alert at around 9 pm on Tuesday from its Dial 100 emergency response service about a 19-year-old girl alleging abduction and gang rape by five men, who then dumped her in a sack on the railway tracks.
Cops from two police stations in Indore East swung into action and the B.Com student who is a Dalit was taken to the MY Hospital (the state’s biggest government hospital).
“Around 50-60 cops from two police stations, besides senior police officials, including the circle SP (CSP), additional SP (ASP) and SP (East) remained awake all through the night investigating the sensational crime, after registering a case of abduction and gang-rape on the girl’s complaint,” CSP-Pardeshipura Nihit Upadhyaya told The New Indian Express on Thursday.
However, as the probe progressed into the case, the teenager constantly kept changing her statements about various aspects of the alleged crime.
The girl initially alleged she was abducted by two men on a motorcycle and then taken to a desolate place where she was gang-raped by five men and then packed in a ruck-sack before being dumped on the railway tracks to die. She also alleged that she was stabbed by the perpetrators of the crime, one of whom was a tenant in the same house where she lived on rent.
Based on her initial statements, the tenant -- an unemployed 25-year-old -- was detained by police.
“She kept on changing her statements about the crime, right from abduction to gang-rape. Once she said that she was abducted after some intoxicant was sprayed on her, then she changed it and put forward the theory that she was injected with something, after which she fell unconscious,” Upadhyaya said.
The police felt suspicious about the girl’s allegations, not only as she was constantly changing her statements, but also because none of the CCTV cameras installed on the route of the crime (right from the alleged abduction to the alleged gang-rape) had any visuals which could prove that the girl was abducted by two men on a motorbike.
“The only thing that the girl seemed to remember correctly was that the motorbike used in her alleged kidnapping belonged to the youth who lived in the same house where she lived on rent. She remembered the mobike’s registration number accurately and never changed it during her series of statements about the alleged crime,” said another senior police officer who was part of the night-long investigations.
It was at around 5 pm on Wednesday that the teen and her live-in partner confessed that they had made up a fake abduction and gang-rape story and also admitted that the wounds on her body were self-inflicted.
Importantly, two years back, the girl had lodged two molestation cases at the Pardeshipura police station of Indore in one of which she has already received around Rs 2 lakh under the government’s victim compensation scheme. Initially, the girl said that owing to an ongoing trial in one molestation case, she is under severe stress and attempted killing herself on Tuesday evening.
But as per the ongoing probe into the case till now, the possibility of the girl having planned to implicate the 25-year-old man in a false case cannot be ruled out. This would have fetched her more money under the victim compensation scheme.
“Under Section 182/211 IPC, we’ve started the process of expunging the case registered on the girl’s complaint,” deputy inspector general of police (DIG-Indore) Harinarayanchari Mishra told The New Indian Express on Thursday.