4 convicted in rape on Indian bus

Kin of victim, who died after attack, again urge they all hang

Police secure the court compound in New Delhi on Tuesday before a judgement was passed on the fatal gang rape of a young woman on a New Delhi bus last year.
Police secure the court compound in New Delhi on Tuesday before a judgement was passed on the fatal gang rape of a young woman on a New Delhi bus last year.

NEW DELHI - Four men were convicted of all charges Tuesday in the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman who was attacked when she boarded a bus in New Delhi last December.

The men will be sentenced at a hearing this morning. The family of the victim has demanded death sentences, and much of the public seemed to share their anger, flooding the streets last year to demand swift punishment in the case. Police were bracing for aftershocks that might follow the sentencing.

The woman was returning home from a movie with a male friend and boarded a private bus with a group of men, mostly working-class migrants who, police said, had been drinking. While the bus circled Delhi’s ring road, the men attacked the woman, knocked her friend unconscious and took her to the back of the bus and raped her, including with a metal rod. The two were dumped off on the roadside, naked and bleeding.

She died two weeks later of her injuries.

Under pressure to respond to the surge of public anger, the government toughened laws on sexual violence.

The prosecution benefited from detailed witness statements given by the victim before she died, and from her male companion, who showed up in a wheelchair to testify. But despite the establishment of special fast-track courts for sex crimes, it has moved more slowly than many hoped, unfolding under unprecedented scrutiny.

One defendant, Ram Singh, who was driving the bus for part of the assault, hanged himself with his bedsheet in a Delhi prison cell this year as his cellmates looked on; his family said he had been subjected to sustained abuse while in custody, and members of his family believe that police murdered him.

A second, who has not been named because he is a minor, was sentenced last month to three years in a juvenile detention center - the heaviest sentence possible in India’s juvenile justice system.

After Tuesday’s verdict, a group of protesters outside chanted: “Hang the rapists! Hang the rapists! Hang the juvenile! Hang the juvenile!”

Five men wore black hoods with hangman’s nooses around their necks. “I just want them to be hanged because there is no other way to stop it,” said Vikas Tyagi, 31, who was with the group. “We are the youth of India, and we are her voice.”

As testimony drew to an end, the special prosecutor in the case, Dayan Krishnan, said each of the six defendants was linked to the crime through DNA evidence.

Bite marks on the woman’s body contained material identifying Singh and Akshay Thakur, who worked as an assistant on the bus, Krishnan told the Press Trust of India. Vinay Sharma, who worked as a handyman at a gym, had left fingerprints on the bus, Krishnan said, and phone calls made from the vehicle were traced to a fruit seller, Pawan Gupta. Another man, Singh’s younger brother, Mukesh, has admitted taking part, he said.

In the cramped settlements that were home to Tuesday’s defendants, some neighbors said the case had cast a stain on all of them, and hoped the men would receive the toughest punishment possible. Soon after Singh was arrested in December, an unknown attacker tried to detonate two crude bombs in front of his home.

Ram Bai, mother to Ram Singh and Mukesh Singh, maintains that her surviving son is innocent and has made it a point to attend the trial, if only to be near him for a few hours.

“When I sat next to him in the courtroom, sometimes I just wanted to reach out and hold my son,” she said, sobbing. “All I can do is pray to God now. God will be the final judge.”

The defense case for the men has been patchy.

Manohar Lal Sharma, the lawyer for Mukesh Singh, argued in an interview that the rape would not have occurred except for “the lust of the boy” who was accompanying the victim to the movies, and said: “This is the boy who should be hanged.”

In another public statement, Sharma suggested that the victim was responsible, saying: “Until today, I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady.”

V.K. Anand, a defense lawyer for one of the men, said the trial had been tainted by the extraordinary public interest in the case. “There were no strong arguments on the part of the prosecution,” he said. “There was media pressure. There was public sentiment. This is a harassed judgment.”

The victim’s parents have called for the death penalty throughout the process.

“These monsters should be hanged,” said her mother, Asha Devi, in an interview with the news channel NDTV as the family left for court Tuesday morning. “When I saw her in the hospital later, she burst into tears and said, ‘Mummy, they beat me up very brutally.’” Her father, Badri Nath Singh, agreed.

“If they are not hanged,” he said, “it will be a shame for everyone.” Information for this article was contributed by Betwa Sharma of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 09/11/2013

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