Four school children of Class XI and XII were apprehended on Monday for allegedly raping a 17-year-old girl at Bawana in Outer Delhi last week.
Aged between 16 and 17 years, the four boys and the victim lived in the same locality and were known to each other, said the police. The girl is a student of Class XI and was studying in a government school in the locality. The boys study in different schools of the same area.
“On some pretext on March 13, the accused persons took the girl to an empty house. There they raped and molested her,” said a police officer. He added that it was being investigated whether all the four raped the girl or was it just one of them. It is learnt that the house where the incident took place belongs to one of the alleged juvenile delinquents.
According to the police, the boys then let off the girl after threatening to shoot her if she revealed the incident to anyone. However, the victim spoke up three days later and narrated the incident to her parents. Subsequently, the matter was reported to the community panchayat and the police.
After a medical examination confirmed that the victim had indeed been raped, a case under Sections 341 (wrongful restraint), 342 (wrongful confinement), 354-A (molestation), 376-D (rape), 506 (criminal intimidation) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code was registered at the Bawana police station.
The accused had fled after the incident was reported to the police. Accordingly a hunt was launched for them. Acting on a tip off, the police officer said, all the accused persons were chased down and apprehended after they purportedly confessed to their involvement in the crime.
“The boys were produced before a Juvenile Justice Board that has sent them to an observation house. Investigations are under way to reconstruct the sequence of events leading up to the incident,” added the police officer.
This is the second such incident in Outer Delhi involving a school student in the recent past. Earlier, on February 28, a Class II student was allegedly assaulted sexually. The perpetrator(s) of that crime are, however, yet to be identified.
