According to reports on Monday, four more suspects are being sought by police following the gang rape of a Spanish tourist who was traveling with her husband on a motorcycle. Three Indian men have already appeared in court.
The couple was camping in the Dumka district of Jharkhand state when the attack occurred on Friday night in eastern India.
A total of seven men are accused of carrying out the brutal assault.
“We have formed a team to hunt the remaining suspects,” senior local police officer Pitamber Singh Kherwar told AFP.
The accused were observed on Sunday being led into court by police officers wearing sacks around their heads and having ropes fastened around their waists. The three were later remanded in custody.
According to the Reuters news agency, the couple told Spanish TV station Antena 3 on Saturday that the men had repeatedly hit the man and sexually assaulted the woman. They said they had camped out because they could not find hotels nearby, Reuters reported.
“We have to ensure strict punishment,” Kherwar said, the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency reported Monday.
According to Kherwar, while one team was looking for more suspects, a special team comprising forensic officers had been assembled to search the attack scene.
“They are constantly raiding places,” Kherwar said in PTI’s report. “We will soon arrest the remaining accused.”. An average of nearly 90 rapes a day were reported in India in 2022, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau.
After a young woman was allegedly brutally raped and tortured by a gang, including having her paraded through the streets of Dehli, police that year arrested eleven people. Also in 2022, a police officer in India was arrested after being accused of raping a 13-year-old girl who went to his station to report she had been gang-raped.
In 2021, a 34-year-old woman in Mumbai died after being raped and brutally tortured.
Large numbers of rapes go unreported due to prevailing stigmas around victims and a lack of faith in police investigations.
Convictions remain rare, with cases getting stuck for years in India’s clogged-up criminal justice system. The notorious gang rape and murder of an Indian student made global headlines in 2012.
Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, was raped, assaulted, and left for dead by five men and a teenager on a bus in New Delhi in December that year.
The horrific crime shone an international spotlight on India’s high levels of sexual violence and sparked weeks of protests, and eventually a change in the law to introduce the death penalty for rape.
