 The graveyard in the St Mary
High School premises at Kalina.
Pic: Shahikant Bajpai Three seven-year-old boys were sexually abused over a period of two and a half months by a pair of older schoolboys in a graveyard in the St Mary High School premises at Kalina.
The police said that the two accused, aged 16 and 13, studying in the 11th and 8th Std respectively, were arrested two weeks ago and are now in the Dongri remand home. They will be produced before the juvenile court today for further custody.
The police said that the accused have been expelled from their school. But while the police refused to name the school where the children, both the abusers and the victims, studied, St Mary High School denied that any of its students were involved in the case.
The incident has shocked the tightly knit community in Kalina village where the families of both the victims and the accused live. It is shocking because the families of the accused children and their victims are members of the same parish and know each other, said a family friend of one of the victim who did not want to be identified.
When contacted, the parents of one of the victims said that they did not want to talk about the incident. The Vakola police, however, said that the victims were lured with gifts of toys and chocolates in the evenings to the unattended graveyard where the two older boys sexually abused them.
Assistant Police Commissioner (Vakola Division) M B Kurne said that a medical examination of the three children by a police surgeon confirmed that they were victims of anal abuse. All the five children lived in the same locality, said Kurne. The police said that a CR was registered on September 13 and charged the two boys under Section 377 of the IPC for unnatural sex. They have also been accused under Section 292 for possession of pornographic books.
While they were being abused, the small children are reported to have complained to their parents that the bigger boys were troubling them. But their parents did not suspect that their children were victims of sexual abuse. They thought that it was harmless ragging by older students. The crime was discovered when one of the children came home with wounds in his anal region. When the parents questioned the child, the story of the abuse and the name of the abusers were revealed.
Prakash Kadu, a police sub inspector at Kalina police chowki said, When the parents of three boys came to us with the complaint, they told us not to arrest the older boys. They told us to just punish them and let them off. But we told them we could not do that and that we will have to take the two abusive boys to the juvenile court.
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