Indian police arrested three men for
the alleged gang rape of an American woman hitchhiking back to
her hotel in a Himalayan resort, an attack that again drew
attention to the scale of sexual violence in the nation.
The three men were arrested today, local police officer
Neel Chand Sharma said by telephone from the town of Manali,
where the rape occurred. The men are in their twenties, he said,
declining to provide any more information. The 30-year-old woman
was assaulted on June 4 after she accepted a lift from the men,
who offered to drop her at the hotel.
A brutal December assault of a female student in New Delhi
who later died shocked the nation and reverberated around the
world, while triggering street protests in India. A Swiss
tourist was raped in Madhya Pradesh state in March and a British
woman jumped out of the window of her hotel room in Agra the
same month to flee an attempted assault.
Safety concerns among women travelers were partly to blame
for a 35 percent drop in foreign female tourist arrivals in the
first three months of this year, according to an April study by
the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry in India.
The U.S. and the U.K. issued travel advisories urging their
citizens to be cautious or avoid traveling to India following
the attacks.
A 2011 survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation listed
India as the fourth-worst place in the world to be a woman,
after Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Pakistan. The report cited abortions of girl fetuses, human
trafficking, sexual violence and poor education.
The December assault set off a debate in a country where,
according to the National Crime Records Bureau, a woman was
raped every 22 minutes in 2011. In the two-hour attack, the
woman was allegedly raped several times before she and a male
friend were dumped naked along a road near New Delhi’s airport.
Passersby ignored the couple and police argued over where
to take them as they lay bleeding on the ground, according to
televised comments by the man who survived the attack. The woman
died from her injuries two weeks later at a Singapore hospital.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Andrew MacAskill in New Delhi at
amacaskill@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Rosalind Mathieson at
rmathieson3@bloomberg.net
Indian Police Arrest Three Men for Gang Rape of US Tourist
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