File photo of protests being held against the Mumbai gang-rape case
A Mumbai court has set a two-month deadline to complete the trial against five men accused of gang-raping a photojournalist at an abandoned mill in the heart of the city last month.
Three adult accused in the case - Vijay Jadhav, Kasim Bangali and Salim Ansari - were produced yesterday for the first hearing of the case. The judge asked for a lawyer to be assigned to them from the legal aid panel.
The Mumbai Police has booked the four for rape, criminal intimidation, unnatural offence, wrongful confinement and criminal conspiracy. The fifth accused has claimed that he is a minor.
The 600-page police charge-sheet has the victim's statement, in which she narrated her ordeal, statements of 86 witnesses, forensic evidence, DNA analysis reports and phone call records.
The five accused allegedly raped the 22-year-old girl on August 22 inside the deserted Shakti Mills compound in central Mumbai while she was on assignment with a colleague. The men allegedly assaulted the colleague and tied him up in belts before taking turns to rape the girl, holding a broken beer bottle to her head.
Three of them - Jadhav, Bangali and Ansari - are also accused in another gang-rape at the same spot on July 31 this year.
The photojournalist's gang-rape case reignited the massive outrage that had swept across the country after the December 16 gang-rape in Delhi, when a 23-year-old medical student was fatally assaulted in a moving bus by six men, one of them a minor.