The police in Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore district arrested three men on Tuesday for allegedly abducting and gangraping a 20-year-old college student from Vellakinar near Thudiyalur, The Hindu reported.
The arrests were made after a 36-hour search operation.
The men, identified as Guna alias Thavasi, Karupasamy alias Satheesh and Kaleeswaran alias Karthik, were intercepted on the outskirts of Mettupalayam on Monday night and shot in the legs after they allegedly tried to escape, Coimbatore City Police Commissioner A Saravana Sundar told The Indian Express.
A head constable was also reportedly injured.
The accused persons were taken to Coimbatore Medical College Hospital for treatment.
The assault took place on Sunday night, when the student and her male friend were in a parked car near the Coimbatore airport around 11 pm.
The three men allegedly broke the car window, attacked the man and abducted the student.
She was taken to an isolated shed nearby and raped. The student was found around 4.30 am on Monday and is undergoing treatment, the police said.
An unidentified police officer told The Indian Express that the three men were arrested after the surveillance linked to a week-old motorcycle theft and a citywide alert about a stolen iPhone.
CCTV footage from the area near the airport showed three men who appeared to be the same as those seen in visuals from an earlier case of a theft of a TVS 50 motorbike, the officer told the newspaper.
The police alerted all second-hand mobile shops in Coimbatore and Mettupalayam about possible attempts to sell a stolen iPhone.
On Monday evening, one of the three men went to a shop to sell the device, but the shop owner alerted the police, the officer told The Indian Express.
“Two others were also waiting by the road in the town’s outskirts and were picked up later,” the newspaper quoted the officer as saying.
While being questioned, the three men allegedly claimed to have hidden a knife in a forested area and led the police there.
“The accused were trying to escape from the spot when the police had to shoot them in the leg in Vellakinaru,” The Indian Express quoted the Coimbatore city police commissioner as saying.
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