Eight men allegedly raped a woman in a vehicle after tying up her husband in Uttar Pradesh’s Jalaun district. The incident took place on May 4 when the couple was coming back from Jaipur where they work as artisans, the police told The Times of India. They were later robbed and dumped on the Auraiya-Jalaun highway.
The couple lodged an FIR early on Friday morning. The woman was sent for a medical examination. “An FIR has been lodged against eight unidentified men for gangrape and dacoity. We will arrest the culprits soon,” Jalaun Additional Superintendent of Police SC Shakya told The Times of India, adding that they have already picked up a few people for questioning.
In their complaint, the woman said that they reached Auraiya by train around midnight on Thursday. The driver of a loader van offered them a lift when the couple was looking for a public transport to Jalaun. After a while, the driver stopped the van at a roadside liquor shop from where other men boarded the vehicle. He then drove the van to a deserted area where the men took turns to rape the woman in front of her husband, after tying him up. The perpetrators also threatened the couple, reported The New Indian Express.
In July last year, a similar incident took place on National Highway 91 near Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh. A gang of highway robbers had raped a 15-year-old girl and her mother when the family was travelling to Shahjahanpur to attend a relative’s funeral. The gang had surrounded their car around midnight, and forced all of them into a field nearby. There, they had gangraped the girl and her mother. The assailants had attacked them barely 100 metres from a police post. However, the police had allegedly taken hours to reach the spot.
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