Mumbai:
Over a year back, four men who raped a young girl from Malad (East) and shot an MMS clip of the crime were arrested by the Kurar police. The MMS clip however, remained at large, and recently, it came back to haunt a 17-year-old girl in Gujarat, who eventually attempted suicide. The face of the Gujarat based girl bore a strong resemblance to that of the rape victim filmed in the MMS clip.
According to police officers at Kurar, cops from the Valsad district of Gujarat recently contacted them, to inform them that a college student in Ahmedabad had attempted suicide twice, after her friends started mistaking her for the rape victim in an MMS that originated in Mumbai. The girl however, denied that she was the woman in the video and claimed that she had never been raped.
Valsad cops then called up Kurar police officers to verify the truth behind the girl's claims. They were told that a certain Suraj Nepali and three others had been arrested in July 2011 for raping a 20-year-old girl from Malad (East). The accused took turns raping the girl, while the others held her down, and one of them shot the video. After the arrests were made, the girl had left for Uttar Pradesh with her parents.
"The victim of the gang rape was in Mumbai when the Gujarat police officers came here. They met the girl and even recorded her statement to clarify that the victim in the video was not the Gujarat-based girl who attempted suicide," said Subhash Dafle, senior police inspector of Kurar police station. The Gujarat police then returned to Valsad and clarified that the local girl was not the victim of rape as shown in the video.
M G Dhavi, senior officer of the Valsad local Crime Branch said, "In order to verify the truth about the rape victim's identity, we traced the MMS clip to Mumbai. The case has now been closed and it has been established that our local college student was not in the clip.
Kurar gang rape
The 20-year-old victim was returning from a temple along with her friends when the four accused drugged her and then took turns raping her on a hillock in Kurar. The incident had been captured on a mobile phone by one of the accused. The video was grainy, but the police were able to build a strong case as it clearly showed the faces of the accused. The police officers received the video from news channels and registered a case. The police then identified the accused and arrested the four men within a fortnight.