2 minors among 3 held for gang-rape in West Bengal’s Birbhum | Kolkata

Kolkata: The Birbhum district police in West Bengal arrested and produced two minor boys and a 23-year-old man before a local court on Tuesday for allegedly raping a homemaker on October 31.

“The Rampurhat court sent the two minors to the district juvenile justice board and remanded the third accused in police custody. While raping the homemaker, the accused recorded a video and used it to blackmail the woman whom they knew,” a police officer said, requesting anonymity.

The survivor had a quarrel with her husband, who works at a temple, during Laxmi puja on October 16 and left for her parent’s home. A few days later, the accused man and the minors allegedly asked her to come to an abandoned house on October 31 and said they would call her husband as well and broker a peace.

“The three raped my wife and recorded a video. She kept silent out of fear. When she returned home on November 3, a neighbour showed me the video and said somebody forwarded it to his number. My wife broke down and revealed the truth. We decided to lodge a police complaint,” the woman’s husband told the local media.

With the Rampurhat incident, the number of rape and molestation cases reported in Bengal between October 30 and November 4 has gone up to ten. Six of these victims were minors. Of them, a six-year-old was murdered in Alipurduar district on November 1 by the two suspects. One of them was lynched by local people.

Several of these crimes came to light days after they happened as the survivors were threatened with dire consequences if they talked. Something similar happened in the Rampurhat incident as well, police officials said.

In one of these ten cases, the South 24 Parganas district police arrested two more men on Tuesday night taking the number of arrests in another alleged gang rape to four.

A 20-year-old woman was allegedly raped by her boyfriend and his associates in the Narendrapur area of South 24 Parganas during Diwali on November 1.

According to the official complaint, the victim and her boyfriend came to know each other on social media.

“They went to the residence of a friend of the principal accused. The woman alleged that she was offered a drink laced with drugs and gang raped when she was unconscious,” a district police officer said.