Constable's daughter gangraped, succumbs to injuries

Constable's daughter gangraped, succumbs to injuries
MANOJ PRASAD

RANCHI, MARCH 15: Barely three days after International Women's Day was observed, a 17-year-old college girl was allegedly gangraped on March 11 in Siriatoli locality here. She succumbed to her injuries on Monday morning.

Poonam, an undergraduate student of Ranchi Women's College and the daughter of a Bihar police constable posted at Jamshedpur, was accorded a tearful farewell on Tuesday by her friends and relatives at her native Kotumba village in West Singhbhum district.

The National Alliance for Women (NAW), a body of activists, also took out a silent march here in protest against the crime and submitted a memorandum to the authorities demanding arrest of the culprits. ``We will sit on a dharna if the criminals are not brought to book,'' said NAW leader Vasvi.

However, the police are yet to arrest anybody in this connection. ``The identity of the culprits is not known, though we are leaving no stone unturned to nab them,'' said city SP Tadasha Mishra. Incidentally, a PTI report said the victim's uncle, Santosh, who is also a head constable of the police, had been held in connection with the incident. It added that a longstanding feud in the family over a piece of land may have been behind the rape.

Poonam lived with her two brothers, Ranjan (9) and Ravindra (11), and sister Pushpa (15) in a two-room house here. Her mother Sukmati (42) is a constable in the Bihar police and stays in Jamshedpur and her father is dead.

With their mother away, Poonam, Ranjan, Ravindra and Pushpa were alone in their house on March 11 and sleeping, when two men allegedly barged in at around 1 am. After tying Poonam's head and neck with a towel, they reportedly pulled her out to a slope in an isolated area nearby.

Pushpa recalls: ``We were terrified. Their faces were covered with towels. Each one had a knife in his hand. After they pulled didi

out of the house and bolted it from outside, we screamed and cried. But no one came to our rescue.''

The FIR filed at the Bariatu police station states that at the slope, Poonam was gangraped by four unidentified men. ``After raping her, they twisted a knife into her forearm and stomach, with the motive to kill her to hide their identity and then they fled, leaving her bleeding,'' Mishra, who is investigating the case, told The Indian Express.

Barely alive, Poonam crawled towards her house and was spotted by some locals. They rushed her to Rajendra Medical College Hospital, says Ram Dhani Mirdha, Poonam's neighbour, who was among those who found her.

Before her death, Poonam was interrogated by Mishra. ``She told me that four men had raped and stabbed her. But she made it clear that she had never seen any one of them before,'' Mishra said.

The postmortem report attributes the cause of Poonam's death to ``haemorrhage and shock as a result of injuries in her right forearm, back and left abdomen, stretching from the upper part to the midline and perforating the lever and stomach'' and also to ``a tear in the vagina wall''. The report also confirmed that Poonam had been raped.

Ironically, on March 8, Poonam had participated in a rally held by her college to observe International Women's Day. ``She marched through the street shouting slogans like `End crime against women'. But she became its victim,'' mourns her college principal Veena Mahto.

The number of rape cases in the state has zoomed up from 1,034 in 1995 to 1,209 in 1996, and from 1,318 in 1997 and 1,305 in 1998 to 2,010 in 1999. Nobody knows how many of these cases have ended in conviction of the accused.