Absconding men arrested for gang-raping minor

Nearly a week after two jawans fled the scene after gang-raping a minor girl on board Howrah-Amritsar Express, authorities apprehended them from Guwahati and brought them down to Kolkata on Saturday.

The police had earlier arrested one of their associates from Jharkhand after the victim identified him.

Authorities arrested Pankaj Kumar and Balak Kumar Yadav from Guwahati airport on Friday and sent them in custody to the railway police at Howrah. The third jawan, Mandreesh Tripathi, was arrested from Madhupur in Jharkhand on Tuesday. They were on leave from their posting at Army’s Eastern Command headquarters in Kolkata and were travelling to their respective homes in Uttar Pradesh.

The trio was on the military coach of the Amritsar-bound train on December 27 when the 14-year-old girl, daughter of an official with West Bengal government, boarded the compartment by mistake. While Tripathi forced her to drink alcohol, the other two took turns to rape her inside the lavatory, soon after the train left Howrah. The Railway Police at Madhupur station raided the compartment and discovered the girl in unconscious state.

The girl’s parents had filed a missing report with a child rights NGO after she ran away from home on Sunday morning for reasons not revealed. The NGO forwarded the complaint to the railway police at Howrah, which in turn alerted their counterparts at Madhupur.

When the girl identified Tripathi as one of the three perpetrators, the police conducted a medical test on the girl, along with forensics tests of her clothes, confirming the rape charge. An official communique from the Army, issued on Saturday evening, however, clarified that the two jawans apprehended from Guwahati airport, are not Army jawans but personnel of the Border Security Force. “It is clarified that the two persons accused of allegedly raping a minor girl on board Howrah-Amristar Express a few days back, apprehended by CISF at the Lokpriya Goponath Bordolai Inter national Airport Guwahati.”