Pakur, Jharkhand:
Eight of the nine men who abducted four minor tribal schoolgirls from their hostel in the Pakur district of Jharkhand on Sunday and gang-raped them, have been arrested.
"Eight of the nine accused have been arrested, and the one remaining will be caught soon," Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren said today.
The police says a group of nine masked men, armed with knives and weapons, barged into a girls' hostel in Litipara block at around 11 pm on Sunday. The intruders locked the school principal, who stayed in the hostel premises, and other students and then allegedly took the four girls away and gang-raped them just 500 metres away from the hostel.
"For half an hour, I was struggling to come out of my room. I broke the door and came out and then I came to know about the incident," said AB Malto, the Principal of the school.
After two hours, the minors were taken back to the hostel by their assailants. The police say all the suspects seem to be adults and probably belonged to neighbouring villages.
Medical tests have confirmed that the girls, aged between 12-14 years, were raped. They belong to the Parhaiya tribe which has been notified as a primitive tribal group.
The latest incident comes on the back of a string of brutal sexual assaults on women in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh last week. The cases highlight how women, including minors, continue to remain unsafe in the country despite the government bringing in a new, tough set of laws to tackle incidents of sexual crimes.