Mumbai: The 15-year-old schoolgirl from Dombivli in Thane district who was allegedly raped for eight months by 33 men was also drugged, coerced to consume liquor, smoke hookah, and was threatened with death if she told the police, she has told the police.
Twenty-nine people have been arrested for the alleged crime so far, including two minors, and the police are pursuing the rest.
The girl was sexually assaulted by multiple accused on at least seven occasions between 29 January 2021 and 22 September 2021, sources in the Thane Police told ThePrint.
The main accused, who allegedly raped her first, took a video, and is then said to have used it to blackmail her, and continue to harass and assault her. If she didn’t comply, he said he would show the video to her family and make it go viral, the police sources said.
On one occasion, the girl’s mother filed a missing person complaint after her daughter did not return home all night. The same month, the girl also had to be admitted to the hospital and put on a saline drip, the sources said.
The Thane Police registered an FIR in the case on 22 September. The 33 accused have been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code related to repeated rape, gang rape, rape of a woman under 16 years of age, as well as provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
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‘Mixed white powder in Thums Up, forced her to drink it’
A source from the Thane Police said after the first incident on 29 January, when the main accused allegedly raped the girl and recorded a video, three others also assaulted her.
The girl then stopped taking any of their calls, deleted their contact numbers from her phone, and thought the incident was behind her after the family moved from a chawl in Dombivli to a building in the same suburb of Mumbai on 15 February, this source said.
However, on 21 February, the main accused met her at a shop near her residence and asked her to meet him, threatening to show the video to her family if she refused, the source said. He then took her to the house of another accused in Dombivli, mixed a white powder in a Thums Up, and asked her to drink it up. When she refused, he told her he would “send her home without any clothes on”, the source said.
The survivor fainted after drinking the spiked soft drink. When she woke up, she found herself in the bedroom of one of the accused with her private parts hurting, the source added.
She went through the same ordeal on 22 March, when she was once again blackmailed into going into the home of one of the accused, and was given a “cold drink with a white powder”.
Parents registered a ‘missing’ complaint
Thane Police sources said one of the accused called the girl on 5 May and took her to a dilapidated chawl where she was made to see the video clip that they were blackmailing her with, while forcing her to smoke hookah.
A source said the girl told the police that six of the accused sexually assaulted her in the chawl, and later, one of them took her to another house in Vadavali village in Thane district where a second accused allegedly raped her. She did not return home the entire night.
The following day, police sources said, her worried mother filed a complaint with the Manpada police station, saying her daughter was missing. On learning about this complaint, the accused threatened to kill the survivor if she decided to tell the police anything about them.
On 16 May, one of the accused leaked her video on a ‘Friends’ WhatsApp group that some of them were part of, and used it as leverage to call the survivor once again, a source said. She returned and was forced to drink liquor, after which seven of the accused allegedly raped her.
Traumatised, the survivor fell ill and her mother briefly admitted her to a hospital, where she was put on a saline drip, the police source said.
But the crimes continued. Two of the accused persons called the survivor again on 28 July, took her to a farmhouse in Murbad in the Thane district and allegedly raped her, the source said.
On 22 September, by which time an aunt had found out about the torture the girl was going through, the latter went to meet a few of the accused persons again, with her aunt and a social worker following in an auto-rickshaw to catch the accused red-handed. However, when the auto-rickshaw got a puncture, the aunt intimated the police.
Twenty-three people were arrested within five hours of the police reaching the spot, and the rest in the subsequent days, the police sources claimed.
(Edited by Paramita Ghosh)
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