Agencies/Kolkata
An Irish charity worker, allegedly raped by an Indian businessman, has been taken to hospital after an overdose of prescription drugs, a medical official and police said yesterday.
The 21-year-old woman was discovered unconscious in her hotel room on Saturday and taken to a hospital in the eastern city of Kolkata, a medical official at the hospital told reporters.
“She had consumed a cocktail of sleeping pills, pain killers and other drugs,” said Sudeshna Lahiri, deputy director of the Calcutta Medical Research Institute.
“It is a case of drug overdose,” Lahiri said. “The medicines were pumped out of her stomach,” she said, adding that she would be better in several days.
“She was found unconscious in her hotel room on Saturday by a fellow Irish national who is staying in the same hotel,” she said.
The woman filed a complaint with police on June 1 saying that an Indian businessman had drugged and raped her in his home in the city.
The Irish national, an engineering student who came to India to volunteer with a local charity, had befriended the businessman at a busy market and they decided to party together to celebrate her birthday, before going back to his house, police have said.
The woman had been due to make a more detailed statement to police on Saturday about the incident, a police officer said, confirming she had been taken to hospital.
In another incident, a Delhi University student was allegedly gang-raped by her driver and his friend in Ghaziabad in a car on Saturday night, police said.
The incident occurred around 8.30pm in a car in a closed factory in Sahibabad Industrial area.
The victim, who lives with her elder sister in Rajendra Nagar, had accompanied her driver Yogesh to collect the registration papers of the car from the man who had sold it to her.
She alleged that Yogesh took a diversion and picked up Asif. He then drove to an abandoned factory, where the two raped her.
School students set Mount Everest record
A team of teenage boys from Lawrence School Sanawar has set a new record as six of its members conquered the world’s highest peak Mount Everest recently. Fifteen-year-old Raghav Joneja became the youngest Indian to climb the highest peak, chief co-ordinator of the expedition P S Grewal said yesterday. They became the first school team in the world to scale the peak. It also became the youngest team to scale the peak in Nepal. Raghav is the second youngest person in the world to have scaled the 8,848m Mount Everest. Ajay Sohal, 16, from Himachal Pradesh, became the second youngest person in the country and the third youngest in the world to scale Mount Everest.
Lottery sets aside fundsfor dialysis machines
“Karunya Lottery”, the brainchild of Kerala Finance Minister K M Mani, has set aside Rs365mn for new dialysis machines. The income from the sale of the lottery tickets is exclusively meant for extending financial assistance to poor patients ailing from diseases of the kidney, heart, nerves and liver, or haemophilia, and cancer. “Twenty-seven hospitals at the district- and taluk-levels will get dialysis machines at a cost of Rs31.50 crore. The five state-run medical colleges also will have new dialysis units and Rs5 crore has been set aside for it,” Mani said in a statement. Since its launch in October 2011, the scheme, under which Rs1.5bn was disbursed, has benefited 14,895 people.
Women chop off hands of molester father-in-law
Enraged over repeated attempts by their father-in-law to sexually assault them, two women in a Bihar village chopped off the man’s hands, police said yesterday. “The hands of Radheyshyam Singh, a resident of Bhanas village in Rohtas district, were chopped off by his daughters-in-law after he attempted to molest them,” Deputy Superintendent of Police Krishna Kumar Singh said. Two days ago, Singh tried to molest one of his daughters-in-law as she was busy cutting vegetables. The woman raised an alarm, and the other daughter-in-law rushed to intervene. “They overpowered him and chopped off both his hands with a sharp weapon,” police said.
PM to hold all-party meeting on Maoists
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will hold an all-party meeting today to fine-tune the government’s strategy to deal with Maoists, official sources said yesterday. The meeting comes in the wake of last month’s attack by Maoists on a Congress convoy in Chhattisgarh which wiped out the party’s leadership in the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state. Addressing the chief ministers’ meeting on internal security on Friday, the prime minister said the government’s two-pronged anti-Maoist strategy of sustained operations and addressing development issues needed to be strengthened. The May 25 attack killed 28 people including former Congress state unit chief Nand Kumar Patel and his son.
Former CPM legislator shot dead in Bengal
Former Communist Party of India (Marxist) legislator Dilip Sarkar was shot dead yesterday in West Bengal, police said. “Sarkar was shot dead by four men in Burnpur in Burdwan district,” Police Commissioner Ajay Nand said. The veteran Marxist, critically injured in the attack, was rushed to hospital but he died on the way, he said. Sarkar, 64, had represented the Barabani assembly constituency and was a secretariat member of the party’s district committee. The CPM pointed fingers at the ruling Trinamool Congress and called a 12-hour shutdown in Asansol today. “The Trinamool has created a reign of terror across the state,” said party’s district committee secretary Amol Haldar.