Delhi Gang Rape Trial: All Four Men Found Guilty

Four men have been convicted of the gang rape of a 23-year-old woman as she travelled on a bus in Delhi.

Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh Singh lured the woman and her male friend onto the bus as they returned home from watching a movie last December.

The physiotherapy student was raped and assaulted with an iron bar before she was dumped on the roadside with her friend.

She suffered serious internal injuries and died in a Singapore hospital 13 days after the attack.

The brutality of the assault triggered waves of protests across India, with new laws introduced and existing ones amended to give women greater protection.

Fast-track courts were also set up to try men accused of sexual crimes.

The conviction of the four men follows an eight-month trial, during which more than 100 people gave evidence.

The case had been expected to finish sooner, with defence lawyers accused of using delaying tactics.

The men, who were found guilty of all charges against them, including rape and murder, are expected to be sentenced on Wednesday, when they could be given the death penalty.

Defence lawyers for Thakur, Sharma and Singh, who occasionally drove the bus and cleaned it, said they will appeal the verdict.

A fifth defendant, Ram Singh, was found hanged in his cell in Delhi's Tihar prison in March. His family and defence lawyers believe he was murdered.

A sixth person, who was a juvenile at the time of the attack, has already been found guilty of murder, rape and kidnapping.

He was sentenced to three years in a correction facility - the maximum penalty he could be given.

The parents of the victim, who argue the punishment is too lenient, called for him to be tried as an adult and to be hanged.

SkyNews

Another Gang Rape in India: American Tourist Falls Victim

An American woman has been gang-raped in a town in northern India.

 

The 30-year-old got a lift with a driver of a truck on Monday, which also had two other men travelling in it.

The woman was driven to a secluded area where she says she was raped by the three men.

She reported the attack to police and an investigation was launched.

Police said three men have been arrested in connection with the alleged hour-long assault.

Authorities had issued an alert and set up roadblocks to check any trucks leaving the town.

 

The arrests come after a survey suggested the number of foreign women tourists visiting India has fallen by 35% following several sex attacks that have made global headlines.

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India said female tourist arrivals fell after the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old Indian student by six men on a bus in Delhi last December.

That attack brought simmering anger about endemic sex crime to the surface and led to violent protests in cities across the country.

It was followed by reports of further attacks, including the alleged gang rape of a Swiss cyclist in the central state of Madhya Pradesh in March.

In a separate incident the same month, a British woman travelling in northern India jumped out of the third-floor window of her hotel room in Uttar Pradesh fearing a sexual attack after the hotel's owner tried to force his way into the room.

A South Korean tourist was allegedly drugged and raped in the same state in January by the son of the owner of a hotel where she was staying.

SkyNews