Janjivan Bureau / New Delhi : The father and brother of the 20-year-old woman who was gang-raped and tortured by four men in UP’s Hathras two weeks ago, and who died at a Delhi hospital this morning, are in the middle of an emotional stand-off with police officers trying to break up their protest.
The young woman’s family, along with a multitude of sympathisers and activists, are camped outside the city’s Safdarjung Hospital demanding to be told of the location of her body.
Visuals from the hospital exterior show hundreds of people gathered around a black Scorpio SUV with UP number plates, in which a lone police officer is sitting. Amid a lot of shouting and shoving, cops can be seen trying to control the situation.
The family has claimed that they are being forced to return to Hathras as the authorities try to dispose of the woman’s body in secret. Earlier the cops had managed to force the father into the car, but the woman’s brother had refused and continued his protest outside.
Later visuals showed that the father too had exited the car.
The family has refused to budge till they are told of the whereabouts of the woman’s body and are assured justice – that the four men accused of her gang-rape, torture and now murder will be punished.
The police say that the protests launched by the father and brother have now become unmanageable, particularly during the Covid pandemic. The protesters, the cops say, are not following social distancing rules and few, if any, of them are wearing face masks.
The cops also say that the families of other patients in the hospital have voiced concern over the possibility of the virus spreading among them.
Visuals from the hospital show a lot of confusion and ruckus, making it difficult to identify protesters among the crowd and how they may or may not be behaving.
A 19-year-old Dalit rape victim, who was gang raped and left paralysed by four upper caste men, died a fortnight after the attack in a Delhi hospital on Tuesday.
The family of the girl informed that she died around 3 am, Superintendent of Police, Hathras, Vikrant Vir, said.
She was shifted to the Safdarjung Hospital in the national capital on Monday evening after her condition deteriorated.
On September 14, the victim was dragged by the dupatta around her neck to a field when she had gone to collect cattle fodder, which injured her spinal cord. When she was held down, she apparently bit her own tongue which caused a deep cut Fakhrul Hoda, head of neurosurgery at the Aligarh hospital where she was being treated, told reporters that: “Surgery to fix her spine could only have been done after her condition improved. The damage to the spinal cord appeared to be permanent.”
The victim, youngest of five siblings, was on life support for sometime. The girl was referred to Delhi on Monday on her father’s request. Her brother accompanied her to Delhi.
A week after she was hospitalised, the girl told the police that she had been raped by four men whom she also named.
All four accused she named — Sandip, Ramu, Lavkush and Ravi — were arrested for gang rape, attempt to murder and under Sections of the SC/ST Act.
Her father had told reporters on Sunday that the families of the four accused have been threatening them for speaking out. The girl had also told her family that the four men had threatened her with dire consequences if she informed anyone about the incident.
