Mumbai:
The Mumbai Police has detained seven men after rounding up many people as it looks for a man who entered the flat of a Spanish woman and raped her with a knife to her throat, in Bandra, one of Mumbai's most expensive suburbs.
The police have also organised a sketch of the rapist based on the description given by the victim; the cops believe the culprit is a serial thief who shimmied up the water pipes to her apartment with relative ease. The 27-year-old woman has not yet identified anyone, the police said.
The woman has told the police that at 4.30 in the morning on Monday, a man who she did not recognise entered her apartment on the third floor through an open window.
He held a knife to her throat while he raped her, she told the police. After he raped her, he began searching the house for valuable items. The Spaniard, a musician, managed to run to her neighbour's door and shouted for help. There was no response, so she went back into her own apartment and locked herself into her bathroom for over an hour.
When she finally felt safe enough to emerge, she called the police. The Spanish victim, who rented her apartment in June, lives with a room-mate, who is travelling to Kerala. The police initially said the victim is a German citizen, but clarified at night that while her parents live in Germany, she is Spanish.
The assault on a young woman alone in her flat, and her futile attempts to get a neighbour's help have drawn comparisons to the grizly murder in August of Pallavi, a 25-year-old lawyer, who tried to escape a watchman who entered her home. She was found dead, her bloody handprints on the wall near other flats on the same floor, the tragic remnants of her search for someone who could save her.