A 12-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped by five men in Lucknow. She's undergoing medical tests.
Highlights
- Young girl raped in Lucknow, allegedly by five men
- Parents held hostage to prevent them from intervening
- 20 men allegedly broke into house on Tuesday morning
Six knocks and loud banging on the door of a one-room house on the outskirts of Uttar Pradesh's Lucknow announced the nightmare that would end nearly an hour later with the gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl and an assault on her parents and little brother.
A gang of around 10 men barged into the house late on Tuesday night and attacked the girl's parents so brutally that her father suffered severe head injuries. Then they dragged the child out of the house to a spot around 600 metres away and took turns to rape her.
The girl's eight-year-old brother said: "They broke open the latch. Then they hit my mother. When my father tried to stop them, they beat him hard and his head was bleeding."
The police today said some people had been detained and were being questioned, but no one has been arrested.
The girl's father is a carpenter. A bed, utensils and boxes of clothes dominate the single room that the family built on a plot of land they bought two years ago. There are no proper roads to the village surrounded by thick mango orchards.
As outrage swirled over the attack on a child, state minister Ravidas Mehrotra visited the girl in hospital and said she is out of danger. "We are not insensitive. All efforts are being made to arrest the accused," he told NDTV.
Ahead of elections, the state's Akhilesh Yadav government confronts a series of shocking cases of sexual and other crimes across the state.
In July, a teen and her mother were raped in the fields surrounding a major highway in Bulandshahr near Delhi. The young rape survivor has asked the Supreme Court to monitor the investigation after a senior minister, Azam Khan, dismissed the attack on her as "a political conspiracy" to malign the government.