MALAPPURAM: In a shocking incident, a 15-year-old boy has been arrested by the Kondotty police in Kerala on Tuesday for attempting to rape a 23-year-old woman.
Kondotty Inspector Pramod MC told TNIE that the boy confessed to the crime. He was held after police questioned several people in the Kottukkara area. The officer said the motive of the crime will only be known after quizzing the boy in detail.
The rape attempt occurred at 12.45 pm on Monday. The boy caught hold of the woman while she was walking from her house to Kottukkara junction. She usually catches a bus from the junction to go to a computer centre in Kondotty where she is studying.
"There is a one-kilometre distance between her house and Kottukkara junction. So, she usually takes a shortcut through a paddy field to reach the junction," said Ummer Farook, councillor of Kottukkara.
Malappuram district superintendent of police Sujith Das told The New Indian Express that the boy was following the woman for at least 200 metres before he attacked her.
Sources said the boy held the woman from behind and dragged her to a nearby plantain farm. "When she resisted the rape attempt, the boy hit her on the face with a stone. Also, he tied her hand using her overcoat. She somehow managed to run away while he was trying to grab another stone to attack her," Ummer Farook said.
She ran into one of the nearby houses and sought the help of a woman there. Ummer Farook said, "The woman in the house informed her neighbours and alerted me. Her face was swollen in the attack with the stone. He also tore her clothes. We gave her first aid and shifted her to Kondotty Taluk hospital. She was later shifted to Manjeri Medical College Hospital for medical checkups."
Sujith Das said that the victim has suffered a contusion on the face and abrasions on her neck, hands and face. "The injuries are not that serious," he said.
"We cannot conclusively say in what kind of mindset the teenager was at the time. It is for clinical psychologists and experts to explain. But one thing is certain, for the last one and a half years, students were confined to their homes due to Covid-19 and attending online classes. We don't know how they were spending the time, particularly students who were 12 years and above," Sujith Das noted.
The teenager is a class X student and judo champion. He has suffered minor injuries and when people at home questioned him about scratches on his body, he claimed that he was attacked by a stray dog.
He would be produced before the juvenile justice board, police said.