A 45-year-old woman was publicly thrashed and her clothes torn off by a mob in south-west Delhi’s Palam on Wednesday when she tried to stop it from attacking her 65-year-old landlady. A case was registered on Friday.
The police said the woman approached the Palam police station on Friday and lodged a complaint against several people, including women, for thrashing and tearing her clothes.
“We have registered an FIR under IPC Sections 354 [molestation] and 323 [voluntarily causing hurt] against the people involved in the act. We have also procured CCTV footage of the incident to identify the accused. They will be arrested soon,” said a senior police officer.
Landlady attacked
In her complaint, the victim said that on Wednesday at 11.30 a.m., she heard a commotion in the house. She went to check and found a group of people, including several women, beating up her landlady. She tried to intervene and requested them to leave, but they attacked her as well.
“Men and women started thrashing me with belts and rods. When I ran for my life, they chased me and tore off my clothes in full public view on the street. No one came to rescue me. After I fell unconscious, they left me. I approached the police after I gained consciousness,” she said.
The victim alleged that she was thrashed for nearly an hour and passers-by only stopped to make videos on their mobile phones, which they later posted on social media. “But no one volunteered to inform the police about the incident,” she said.
In the videos circulated on social media, the victim was seen with bruises all over her body. The complainant claimed that the attackers pulled away a large clump of her hair.
She also alleged that she approached the police on Wednesday itself but the local police took action only after the intervention of senior police officers.
Family dispute
The police said the landlady had disinherited her only son from an ancestral property after a dispute with her daughter-in-law around two months ago.
The son used to visit his mother frequently but the landlady had barred the entry of her daughter-in-law in the house. The police said that on Wednesday, the daughter-in-law, along with her other relatives, barged into the landlady’s house to attack her.
