Police said yesterday they had arrested two contract workers accused of raping a woman at the premises of technology giant Infosys, in the latest incident of sexual violence to rock the country.
The men, aged in their 20s, filmed the alleged assault, which occurred on Sunday at one of the IT firm’s offices in Pune, officers said.
“The woman works as a cashier at the canteen and had gone to the washroom in the evening when one of the men assaulted her while the other filmed it,” Suresh Bhonsle, a senior police inspector, said.
“They have been arrested and produced before the court,” he said, adding that the men also worked in the canteen, as a cleaner and a waiter.
Infosys, India’s second largest IT services exporter, said in a statement that it was investigating the “alleged incident at our Pune campus involving our partners’ contractual staff”.
“We have stringent security measures in place on all our campuses and have a zero tolerance policy against sexual harassment which extends to our contractual staff as well.
“The company will take necessary action as per policy,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, a West Bengal court remanded in police custody a soldier arrested for the gang-rape of a teenaged girl inside a train.
The 14-year-old girl, hailing from Dum Dum in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, was allegedly raped by two army men after forcing her to drink alcohol inside a reserved military compartment of the Howrah-Amritsar Express.
The girl, who boarded the train from Howrah on her way to Ludhiana, was rescued in a joint effort by Railway Protection Force (RPF) and Government Railway Police (GRP) at Madhupur station in Jharkhand on Monday.
While two of the alleged culprits managed to escape, the third, who allegedly forced the girl to drink, was arrested by the GRP and handed over to the Howrah GRP which has now taken over the investigation.
Charged with several offences including under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, the man, identified as Manjrish Tripathi, was presented before a court in Howrah which remanded him in police custody for seven days.
The girl identified the man in a video footage.
According to the family, the girl had left her home unannounced to meet a man in Ludhiana whom she had befriended on a social networking site.
The army, which has initiated a probe, promised it would assist police in locating the other suspects.
The incident is the latest in a series of high-profile cases to have shone a spotlight on women’s safety in India in recent years.
It comes a week after lawmakers passed a bill allowing harsher punishments for juveniles aged 16-18 following an outcry over the release of a young rapist who served three years in a detention facility for his part in a notorious gang-rape of a physiotherapy student in New Delhi in 2012.
The parents of the December 16 gang-rape victim, who died at a hospital in Singapore, said rape cases must be fast-tracked.
At a gathering at Rajghat in New Delhi on their daughter’s death anniversary, the parents also demanded that punishment should be meted out to rapists at the earliest and that rapists should be executed for the rarest of rare crimes.
