Police in India are investigating an alleged incident of gang rape of a 16-year-old girl who was being treated at a hospital for snakebite.
The alleged incident took place on Wednesday when the teenage girl was receiving treatment in the intensive care unit of a private hospital in Bareilly in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. She had been at the hospital for treatment after being bitten by a snake in her village and had been shifted to the ICU just a day earlier.
“The girl was not in a condition to speak or call for help at the time of the incident. But she informed her relatives about it when she was transferred to the general ward on Friday,” Superintendent of Police Abhinandan Singh said.
The incident came to the light after the girl informed her family about it and her father lodged a police complaint on Friday.
“According to the complaint, the accused raped the girl in her bed inside the ICU. The bed has long curtains around it, and that apparently blocked the view of other staff,” the quoted Mr Singh said.
Students protesting against increasing incidents of violence against women in India. Source: AAP
All four accused, a hospital staffer among them, are on the run and a manhunt is on to catch them.
While hospital authorities said they would cooperate with the police investigation, they denied the allegation of rape.
“There were other patients and at least three staff members inside the ICU on Wednesday. None of them has corroborated the claims of the minor girl,” the hospital management said in a written statement.
Mr Singh said the girl’s medical examination report is awaited and the clothes she was wearing at the time of the alleged incident had been sent for forensic examination.
India has been rocked by a number of incidents of sexual assault in recent years, including a fatal incident in December 2012 when a medical student was gang-raped in a bus in national capital New Delhi.
More recently, over a number of days in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, that saw protest demonstrations across the country, forcing the government’s hand to enact the law to give death sentence to child rapists.
