Woman gangraped, thrown into gorge

Bhopal: In a near replay of Nirbhaya case, a tribal woman in a Chhattisgarh district was gangraped, thrashed black and blue and then thrown into a gorge by ten men, including two minors, the police said on Tuesday.

The rape victim lay unconscious for around 10 hours at the foot of a waterfall and dragged herself for nearly three km in forest to reach her sister’s house after 
she regained consciousness.

According to the police, the gory incident took place in the district headquarters town of Jashpur in the afternoon of September 5 when the rape victim was walking on the national highway along with one of her acquaintances.

Ten men waylaid them and later took her to the nearby forest where she was gangraped for the entire night.

She was beaten black and blue when she resisted and later thrown into the gorge.

“At one point of time, I felt that I was going to die. I was finding it difficult to breathe when I was dragging myself out of the gorge. I lost my consciousness several times. But, I never gave up. I was determined to survive to bring the rapists to book,” the local police quoted the woman as saying.

According to the investigating officer, she was admitted in the local hospital after she reached her sister’s house. She was in a serious condition and also in a trauma.

The victim, accompanied by her parents, came to the Jashpur police station to lodge the First Information Report (FIR) on September 9, four days after the incident.

“We were so moved by her plight and courage that we constituted four teams to nab the culprits. We rounded up 40 people. She could recognise five accused in the identification parade of the suspects,” the investigating officer of Jashpur police station told this newspaper on Tuesday.

The other five accused were arrested on Tuesday. The rape victim has now been admitted to a local hospital.