Eight men have been held by Indian police in relation to the gang rape of a Spanish tourist, according to reports released by local media on Tuesday. Five additional individuals have been apprehended.
The woman was attacked last week while camping in the Dumka region of the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. She was traveling with her husband on a motorcycle.
Five suspects were shown on television by the Press Trust of India news agency, shackled and roped to one another in a line in front of seated police officers.
Three more guys showed up in court on Monday with sacks over their heads, and they were subsequently remanded in detention.
According to PTI, which quoted police, “eight arrests have been made thus far in connection with the alleged gang rape of a Spanish woman.”
According to broadcaster NDTV, the couple received a $12,000 check from the police as payment under a “victim compensation scheme.”
The National Crime Records Bureau estimated that in India in 2022, there were around ninety rapes reported every day on average. But a lot of them remain unreported because of the stigma that surrounds victims and people’s mistrust in police investigations.
Convictions are still uncommon because of the lengthy case backlog in India’s congested criminal court system.
In 2012, news throughout the world was dominated by the infamous gang rape and killing of an Indian student. In December of that year, Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old student of physiotherapy, was attacked, sexually molested, and left for dead on a bus in New Delhi by five men and a teenager.
After weeks of protests and an international emphasis on India’s high rates of sexual violence, the horrifying crime led to a reform in the law that instituted the death penalty for rape.
