written by Staff
Saturday April 20, 2013
NEW DELHI: Protests erupted in the national capital on Saturday demanding justice for the five-year-old girl who was brutally raped and punishment for policemen for their insensitivity in dealing with the case even as police arrested the 22-year-old accused from Bihar's Muzaffarpur district.
In a throwback to scenes of December last in the wake of gangrape of a girl in a moving bus, protesters belonging to womens' organizations and ABVP clashed with the police when they tried to break the barricades and enter into the police headquarters near the ITO in central Delhi where the main roads were closed to traffic.
Protesters shouted slogans demanding the resignation of the police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, saying he "failed to tackle the rape crimes" in the city.
Activists belonging to Aam Aadmi Party also protested outside Delhi Police Headquarters alleging police apathy in the case.
A protester was detained for trying to enter the police headquarters.
Security was tightened in the area with deployment of armed police personnel and at the residences of Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde and Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit.
Protesters also took to the streets near AIIMS where the girl was shifted to last evening for treatment. The condition of the girl was stable on Saturday, doctors attending on her at AIIMS said.
The protesters focused their attack on the policemen of Gandhi Nagar who allegedly tried to hush up the case by offering money to the parents of the victim and not pursue the case. Rejecting the suspension of the sub inspector of the station, the activists demanded their arrest for beating up young girls who went to protest at the police station.
The girl was brutally raped and assaulted allegedly by her neighbour while being held captive and starved for two days. She also contracted infection from foreign objects inserted in her body.
Shocked and anguished at the sexual assault, President Pranab Mukherjee called for urgent introspection to identify causes behind repeated failure of society to ensure security of women and children.
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The Times of India
written by Staff
Sunday April 21, 2013
NEW DELHI: An early morning dramatic raid at a nondescript Chiknauta village in Muzzafarpur district of Bihar, 70 km from state capital Patna by a posse of policemen - from Delhi Police, local cops and the Bihar STF - finally led to the arrest of Manoj Kumar Sah (22), the man who allegedly brutalized a five-year-old girl in east Delhi leading to a groundswell of protests in Delhi in the past two days.
Manoj, who was in his pyjamas and hiding at his in-laws' residence since April 17, was apparently scared and told his wife that he might be arrested though he didn't reveal the reason for this fear. He had returned from a yagna that was part of a village fair when the village chowkidar led the raiding party to the house around 2 am. The accused was flown to Delhi later in the day after being produced at a duty magistrate's court in Muzaffarpur after obtaining a transit remand for 72 hours.
The police got the accused medically examined in Muzaffarpur's Sadar hospital and he was found to be mentally and physically fit. Workers of Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Admi Party staged a protest at Patna airport where the accused was taken en route to Delhi on transit remand.
Police investigations so far have revealed that Manoj had come to Delhi with his father 15 years ago. While his father opened a juice shop and later took to street-vending at Seelampur, the accused worked as a casual labour in garment factories in the trans-Yamuna region. The Bihar police might ask his counterparts in Delhi to question him on the rape and murder of one of his sister-in-laws to ascertain if he was involved in that crime.
DCP (east) Prabhakar said that Manoj told police during his initial interrogation that he fled the house in east Delhi's Gandhi Nagar around 7 pm on April 15 to catch the 8.30 pm Swatantrata Senani Express for his hometown taking the girl to be dead. He reached Chapra on April 16 and then went to his native village of Bharthua for the night before moving to his in-laws' residence the next morning.
After piecing together the sequence, the investigators now believe that the girl might have been kidnapped around 6 pm and raped and brutally assaulted allegedly by Kumar, who then left the place around 7 pm. It is however, not clear whether the girl had gone missing on April 14 itself, a claim the police denied.
"Manoj told us that he left the house thinking that the girl was dead...The girl was inside the house for 40 hours," Prabhakar said. The girl's mother had told the police that the victim, who was playing outside their home, went missing around 6 pm and if the versions of both the mother and Kumar are to be believed, the abduction and the brutal rape of the victim took place within the span of just one hour.
Though sources in Bihar police claimed that Manoj had blamed another man - who reportedly helped him get a house at Gandhi Nagar - for the rape, the police said so far they have no evidence to investigate on those lines though they are not ruling out the possibility of another person being involved in the crime. "We will have to interrogate him in custody to ascertain the facts," Prabhakar said.
Manoj had married just a year ago. Cops say it was a love marriage. He has two brothers and four sisters who are staying in Bihar. The accused had been earlier arrested in Delhi for trespassing for which he spent a month and seven days in jail. It was a case of trespassing registered at Gandhi Nagar. His father had cut him out of his property and a case had been registered in this regard.
There is confusion on the exact date that Manoj moved to this house. However, Prabhakar said that they will be confronting the house owner with Manoj to extract the truth. A case against the owner has already been registered at the Gandhi Nagar police station for failing to initiate the verification process of Manoj.
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