At a time when the country mourns the death of the Delhi gang-rape victim and demands enhanced measures to ensure safety of women, a 32-year-old woman was gangraped, murdered and her body was hung from a tree near the Bhagalpur district of Bihar on Saturday.
The police said that the woman was dragged to a mango orchard where the offenders raped and then strangled her to death. They then hung her semi-naked body from a tree.
The woman who hailed from New Jalpaiguri district in West Bengal was travelling to Delhi from Alipore in the Brahmaputra Mail along with her son.
Narrating the incident, Meenu Kumari, ASP, Bhagalpur, said that the woman started exhibiting restlessness in the jampacked carriage of the train. She tried to get down at Sahibganj but was prevented from doing so by her co-passengers.
Later, when the train slowed down between Vikramshila and Kahalgaon stations she stepped out and was forcibly taken to the mango orchard by a group of inebriated men, where they molested and killed her. Kumari added that liquor bottles were recovered at the crime spot.
The police also recovered a railway ticket and a cell phone number of the victim’s village pradhan written on a piece of paper. Her body was sent to the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital in Bhagalpur for postmortem on Sunday.
In a similar incident which created outrage across the nation, a 23-year-old paramedical student was gangraped by six men in a moving bus in New Delhi last month. The victim succumbed to her injuries and the accused were arrested. Their trial is in process and if convicted, they could face the death penalty.
