Murder, rape charges filed on 5 in India

An elderly man lights a candle Thursday at a makeshift memorial in New Delhi for a 23-year-old university student who died after she was gang-raped on a bus. The assault has sparked protests in India and prompted calls for better protection of women.
An elderly man lights a candle Thursday at a makeshift memorial in New Delhi for a 23-year-old university student who died after she was gang-raped on a bus. The assault has sparked protests in India and prompted calls for better protection of women.

— Police filed formal charges of rape and murder in a New Delhi court Thursday against five men accused of gang-raping a 23-year-old woman aboard a moving bus, an attack that has sparked nationwide anger and grief.

Th e young wo man, a medical student, died Saturday at a hospital in Singapore, where she had been taken for treatment of severe injuries and infections.

Her name has not been released, in accordance with Indian law that prohibits the naming of sexual-assault victims.

Police had arrested six suspects, including the bus driver, his brother and friends. But Thursday’s charges sheet did not include the name of the sixth person because he has told authorities he is underage. The individual, who also is suspected of sexually assaulting the woman, has undergone a medical test to confirm his age, police said. If he is found to be underage, he will face charges in a separate juvenile-justice court.

The charges were filed late in the day, after the main judge left the court. They include gang-rape, murder, unnatural offenses, kidnapping, robbery and destruction of evidence, a police official told reporters.

According to the Press Trust of India, the police sought court permission to keep the charges sealed, to protect the identity of the victim, and asked that the trial be closed to the public. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Saturday.

The men charged were Ram Singh, the bus driver; his brother Mukesh Singh, who cleans buses for the same company; Pavan Gupta, a fruit vendor; Akshay Singh, a bus washer; and Vinay Sharma, a fitness trainer. They did not appear in court. Authorities have said they will push for the death penalty for the men.

The victim and her male friend were returning home from a movie Dec. 16 when they were brutally beaten — and the woman was raped — on the bus, a privately owned vehicle that ferried schoolchildren by day.

The five are accused of luring the woman and her boyfriend onto the bus, beating them and abusing her so brutally with a metal rod during the rape that she suffered fatal internal injuries.

The bus was supposed to be off the road when the attack happened, but the driver, his brother and their friends were out on a “joy ride” that night and stopped at the bus stop to offer the medical student and her male companion a ride, police said.

After the attack, the woman and her companion were forced off the vehicle and left in the street. The woman’s companion told police that the bus swerved to run her over, but he managed to pull her out of the bus’s path in time.

The police took the victim’s testimony before her death and interviewed about 40 witnesses. They also examined forensic evidence and footage from hidden cameras, which showed images of the bus during the reported hour of the attack.

The assault caused a national uproar in India. Thousands of young men and women marched through the streets, many of them holding placards demanding the death penalty for the accused.

The rape case will be tried in a new fast-track court that will hold hearings daily, a rarity in India’s crawling judicial system, where trials can drag on for decades.

Chief Justice Altamas Kabir, who on Wednesday inaugurated the first of four fast-track courts in New Delhi for cases of violence against women, said the judicial system must move more efficiently to avoid citizen attempts at vigilante justice.

“People’s reaction has been ... ‘Do not send the accused to trial. Hand them over to us; we will deal with them. Hang them,’” Kabir said. “But let us not get carried away.”

Reflecting the public anger surrounding the bus-rape case, the president of the local bar association told reporters Wednesday that the group resolved not to offer defense services to any of the accused. If the court appoints a defense lawyer from the bar, Raj Kumar Kasana said, the group will consider whether that lawyer should accept the assignment.

In New Delhi on Thursday, a newly formed government task force met for the first time to discuss implementation of measures to enhance the safety of women in public places. The meeting was attended by senior police officers, public transport and internal security officials, and representatives of the municipal women’s commission.

Sushilkumar Shinde, India’s home minister, told reporters that his ministry has decided to post at least two women officers with the rank of sub-inspector at every police station, a move he said should encourage women to file abuse complaints without fear.

On Wednesday, the father of the woman who died told the Economic Times newspaper that his family would like the government to name a new anti-rape law after his daughter, as a tribute to her.

“All the six accused should never be allowed to step out of the jail. ... They must be hanged,” the father told the reporter in an interview in his ancestral town in northern India. “They are a threat to every woman on the street.”

Gang-rapes have become frequent in India, a country that some surveys suggest has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. Rape complaints increased 25 percent between 2006 and 2011, although it is impossible to know whether that represents a real increase in crime or simply an increased willingness by victims to file charges and by police to accept them.

The outpouring of anger over the crime caught the government by surprise, and there has been widespread criticism of its aggressive response to protesters, which included tear gas, water cannons and beatings by truncheon-wielding riot police officers. The government invoked a terrorism law that prohibits even small gatherings, and it closed a big portion of the capital to vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which represented a punishing loss to businesses in the area.

The government’s reaction fed longtime criticism that India’s police are too often used to guard the powerful from the people rather than to protect the people from predators. India’s police are generally poorly trained, deeply corrupt and often viewed by women as predators rather than protectors — one reason that laws forbid officers from arresting a woman — or even taking her to a police station for questioning — at night.

The case also has led to a continuing discussion about the conflict between the aspirations of India’s rising middle class and a deeply conservative and patriarchal culture that views the recent educational and economic successes of Indian women with unease and even alarm.

An estimated 25,000 women are murdered each year by families who view the women’s choices of mates as inappropriate, and Indian newspapers and television news programs now feature almost daily stories about new rape cases.

Kishwar Desai, an author, wrote an opinion article Thursday in The Indian Express that said the gang rape illustrated to some that “a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the workforce. The gang rape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.”

Information for this article was contributed by Rama Lakshmi of The Washington Post; by Gardiner Harris and Niharika Mandhana of The New York Times; and by Ravi Nessman, Ashok Sharma and Wasbir Hussain of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/04/2013

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