The police have arrested the two men within hours of the crime.
A day after a 12-year-old girl was raped and murdered by two men who work as Ola cab drivers, outraged Kolkata took to the streets. The opposition Congress led the charge, leading a rally from the area in central Kolkata where the girl was kidnapped.
The two men had picked up the girl from a locality in Central Kolkata around 3.30 am on Wednesday. They repeatedly raped her inside the cab before strangling her and dumping the body at a canal about 12 km away from where she was picked up -- right off the very busy Eastern Metropolitan Bypass.
In a re-run of the infamous December 16, 2012 gang-rape of 23-year-old medical student in Delhi had had seen massive protests across the country, the cab, unnoticed by anyone roamed the streets -- including to key flyovers -- for an hour-and-a-half as the drivers took turns to rape the girl inside.
"Kolkata is not safe for women. In the vicinity of Writers' Building and the police headquarters, a woman was picked up, raped and murdered," said Amitav Chakrabarty, a Congress worker.
Speaking to NDTV, the girl's brother said they raised an alarm almost immediately after she was picked up from the pavement where the family lived.
"She was sleeping with her mother. They came in a car and took her. It took place at 3:30 am. A little later, a police patrol came and we informed them," he said. The girl's mother washes dishes at a local shop.
The police have arrested the two men -- Shankar Shaw and Guddu Singh, within hours of the crime, with the help of CCTV footage. According to the police, the men had pending criminal cases against them.
Ola, in an earlier statement, said at the time of the earlier crime, the drivers were not associated with the company. But it has offered no explanation as to how it accepted men with criminal records.