Under pressure from all quarters for having failed to nab the alleged rapists of a teenaged Dalit girl in Hisar district, Haryana Police Wednesday claimed they have arrested nine people for the crime.
However, out of the eight men named by the victim for her gang-rape Sep 9, only four have been arrested so far. The others taken into custody are those who sheltered the main accused.
The father of the girl committed suicide Sep 18 after he came to know that his daughter had been gang-raped and that a video clip of the crime made by the accused had been circulated in the district.
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Director General of Police Ranjiv Singh Dalal said police had arrested two people from Almora district of Uttarakhand, along with three main culprits, Vikas, Rajkumar and Pawan. Two other people were arrested for sheltering the accused.
Dalal said that of the two people arrested earlier, Baljeet alias Sittu was on police remand up to Sep 29.
He said: "The Hisar superintendent of police had been directed to approach the district and sessions judge with a request to constitute a fast track court so that the gang-rape case could be decided within three months."
The girl, aged 16 and resident of Dabra village near Hisar, 250 km from Chandigarh, was kidnapped by upper caste men from near the urban estate in Hisar Sep 9 and taken to the outskirts of the town. She was allegedly raped by all of them and four of the accused even recorded the crime on their mobile phones. The attackers later circulated the video clip.
Most of the accused belong to the politically dominant Jat community.
Police Tuesday provided security to the girl following building-up of tension between the Dalits and other communities.
The Dalit family had refused to take the body of the rape victim's father from the Hisar hospital mortuary till the attackers, known to be influential in the area, were arrested.
Police finally arrested two of them -- Saturday and Monday. Only after the arrests, did the family take the man's body for cremation.
"We came to know about the incident when she stopped eating. She did not speak about it for about 10 days. Her father consumed something poisonous and died after hearing about it," said the girl's distraught mother.
Representatives of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes met the victim and her family Tuesday. The commission gave a seven-day notice to the government and police to take action against the accused.
"Though there are Jat youths among the gang-rape accused, some belong to other communities also," said a police officer.
The state government announced financial help of Rs.6.2 lakh to the gang-rape victim and a government job to a member of the family, said Deputy Commissioner Amit Aggarwal.
Hisar has seen violence in the past too between the Dalit community and upper castes, especially the Jats.
Jat community members had set many houses of the Dalit community on fire in Mirchpur village in this district in April 2010. A Dalit man and his physically challenged daughter were burnt alive in their house in the incident.u00a0
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