New Delhi: The horror story of the teenaged girl from UP’s Mainpuri allegedly raped by the driver and conductor of a sleeper bus late on 4 August keeps getting murkier. Police say that she was in the bus for three hours.
It was around midnight on 4 August, when an auto-rickshaw driver spotted a distraught girl standing near Ring Road in the Kashmere Gate area. A short conversation revealed that the 17-year-old girl had been “gang raped” by the driver and conductor of a bus she had boarded from nearby Greater Noida’s Pari Chowk.
“The auto-rickshaw driver asked the girl her whereabouts after she was spotted in a distraught state. She was crying and was unable to figure out where she was,” an officer aware of the matter said.
The auto-rickshaw driver drove the girl to Kashmere Gate Police Station where she shared her father’s number with the police and shared her ordeal. “She told us that she boarded the bus around 9 pm and it was not until midnight that was she dumped by the driver-conductor duo near Ring Road,” said the officer.
The girl had left her home in Mainpuri after an argument with her mother over her studies, and was headed to a cousin’s place in Sector 63, Noida when she mistakenly reached Pari Chowk in Greater Noida.
The initial probe has revealed that the survivor was on the bus for nearly three hours. “While the distance between Pari Chowk and Kashmere Gate takes less than an hour to drive, the accused drove the bus around for nearly three hours and eventually took the Expressway to dump her near Kashmere Gate,” another officer said.
The complainant also told the police that the conductor first asked her where she wanted to go, and immediately said that the bus was headed to Sector 63, Noida when the girl said that was her destination. “The conductor asked about her destination and then persuaded her to board the bus,” the officer added.
Surveillance footage has revealed that after dropping the minor girl near Ring Road, the accused drove the bus to the Timarpur Bus Stand area. “The minor was able to identify the bus and the accused on surveillance footage; they were nabbed within a few hours on August 5,” the officer said.
After receiving treatment, the survivor was then handed over to her father, a resident of Mainpuri.
During interrogation, the two accused—driver Kuldeep and conductor Sandeep—told the police that that they picked up the girl seeing her stranded on the road near Pari Chowk. “It was raining and she was all alone, so we picked her up,” the accused said when the police asked them about their motive.
The police had collected samples of hair strands and towels from the bus, the scene of the crime.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
Also Read: An empty bus, rain & 47 km detour: How a UP teen’s search for a ride ended in gangrape