Court orders ID parade of men held for gang-rape

Agencies/KolkataSix men arrested for the gang-rape of a Japanese tourist held hostage in India for nearly a month will appear in an identity parade later this week, a court said yesterday. The six men detained for allegedly extorting more than $1,000 from the 22-year-old tourist and then keeping her as a sex slave for several weeks appeared before magistrates in Kolkata, said police and prosecutors. Five of the men were arrested at the weekend on charges including rape and kidnap while a sixth person was detained early yesterday. The court “ordered an identification parade of all six accused who have been arrested until now” to be held on Friday, public prosecutor Dipnarayan Pakrasi said after the hearing in Kolkata. The suspects will all remain in custody until the parade. Police have previously said the victim will fly home to Japan after taking part in the lineup. The victim’s ordeal began in Kolkata shortly after she arrived on November 20. Police say a group of men, one of whom spoke Japanese, persuaded her to withdraw around $1,200 in cash before travelling with her to the Buddhist shrine of Bodh Gaya in neighbouring Bihar state. There she was handed over to two brothers who allegedly locked her in a secluded basement and repeatedly raped her before she finally managed to escape towards the end of December. Also yesterday police arrested one of five suspects accused of gang-raping a teenage girl inside a local government office in Bihar. The 16-year-old victim was attacked after arriving in Bihar late Sunday where the gang, including a local administrator’s driver, approached her and offered her a lift to a relative’s home. Instead they took her to a nearby local government office in Muzaffarpur district and raped her. The victim, who hails from West Bengal, later escaped and filed a police complaint on Monday. “Five men, mostly youths, forcibly dragged her to a nearby building of the (district) collectorate and gang-raped her till early Monday,” Naseem Ahmad, a senior district police officer, said. Police chief Ranjit Kumar Mishra said that they had “arrested one accused so far and ... are working to arrest the other four.”In another case in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state, one of two police officers accused of raping a teenage girl was reportedly arrested yesterday. The December 31 incident took place in Badaun district when the two policemen picked up the 14-year-old as she stepped out to relieve herself. Badaun was thrown into the spotlight last May when two teenage girls, who were initially thought to have been gang-raped, were found hanging from a tree. India has faced intense scrutiny over its efforts to curb violence against women following the fatal gang-rape of a medical student in New Delhi in December 2012, which sparked a global outcry. Meanwhile, the federal home ministry has proposed setting up 150 special police teams across the country to probe crimes against women and ensure victims get justice.The Investigative Units on Crimes Against Women (IUCAW) would be deployed in India’s 29 states with the aim of strengthening the criminal justice system by conducting thorough probes, leading to stronger prosecutions and higher convictions.