5-year-old rape victim’s ordeal shocks and shames Delhi

Mangalore Today/NDTV

New Delhi, April 19: In a Delhi hospital, a five-year-old girl is fighting for her life after she was raped for three days by a neighbour who is now missing.  

As details of her horrific ordeal emerged, her relatives and other neighbours protested in anger outside the hospital and demanding that she be shifted to a better hospital like the city’s famous All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

 

The child was reported missing on Monday.  When she was discovered brutalized and bleeding in her neighbour’s home, her father says the police offered him Rs. 2000 " to keep quiet".  He said they advised him, "Thank God that she has been found alive."

The suspect lived on the ground floor of the building where the child and her family live. He reportedly refused to give her food and water while he held her hostage.

She was discovered when members of her family heard her screaming on Wednesday evening.

The police has said that it began searching for her as soon as her parents complained that she was missing.  A senior officer told NDTV that public parks in the East Delhi area were combed, but that the neighbour’s house was not searched because the child’s mother said she could not think of any suspects that might have kidnapped her daughter.

Since December, when the fatal gang-rape of a student on a Delhi bus stunned and incensed the country, the city’s police and government have vowed that no effort will be spared to protect women. But a slew of attacks, many of them against young girls, prove that despite the introduction of tougher anti-rape laws and pledges of better policing, little has changed for a city that relentlessly stakes its claim over and over to its shameful description as "the rape capital" of India.