Zee News Bureau/Ritesh K Srivastava & Hemant Abhishek
Lucknow: Certain leads emerged on Friday but no arrest has yet been made into the alleged gang-rape and murder of a 25-year-old woman whose badly mutilated body was found at the outskirts of the state capital yesterday.
After the Akhilesh Yadav government ordered a probe into the horrific murder today,
Additional Director General of Police Sutapa Sanyal, who visited the crime spot, said some people are being questioned on the basis of the leads that emerged over the course of the day. No arrest has been made so far, the ADG told scribes.
Refusing to divulge details of the investigation into the case, which she referred to as a "blind case", Sanyal said there appears to be involvement of more than one person in the crime.
"The case has been registered under Sections 302 (murder) and 201 (destruction of evidence) and after the post mortem report, Section 376 (rape) has also been added," she said, adding that there are 12 injuries on the body of the victim including lacerated wounds.
She said the time of her death has been mentioned as nearly one day before the time of post mortem.
The ADG said multiple teams have been pressed into investigation and the body will be preserved as of now.
To a question on whether the Union Home Ministry has sought any report on the case, Home Secretary Kamal Saxena, who was also present there, replied in the negative.
Sources say UP Police has claimed that the alleged rapists have fled the Lucknow city soon after committing the crime.
Four teams of UP police have been dispatched in various directions to nab the culprits.
According to reports, UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has instructed the state`s Chief Secretary Alok Ranjan to personally monitor the probe into the incident.
Director General of Police AL Banerjee has constituted a special team under the ADG to probe the horrific gang-rape and murder incident.
The decision to this effect was taken following a high-level meeting called by the state`s Chief Secretary, Alok Ranjan, which was attended by Principal Secretary Home, the Director General of Police among other top officials this morning.
A large number of women activists have protested outside the Uttar Pradesh Secretariat demanding the arrest of those guilty of gang-raping and murdering the woman.
Azam Khan, a senior minister in the Akhilesh Yadav government, condemned the incident and assured that those guilty will not be spared. However, his Samajwadi Party colleague Naresh Agarwal accused the media of deliberately projecting the state in a bad light
After taking note of media reports in Lucknow rape case, the state government suspended Inspector Kamruddin and Sub Inspector Munni Lal of the Mohanlalganj Police Station for negligence.
Finger prints and other samples collected from the crime scene were sent to the forensic science laboratory for further investigation.
A delegation of BJP MLAs will also meet Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav to press for strong action against those involved in the gruesome gang-rape and murder of the young woman in the Mohanlalganj area of the capital.
Reacting to the incident, State BJP chief Laxmikant Bajpai said, “Rome is burning and Nero continues to play flute.”
Congress, the BJP, the CPI-M and the BSP have strongly condemned the incident and warned of more protests in case of slow action by the government.
They said the report of the post-mortem examination conducted by a team of six doctors mentions anti-mortem multiple hemorrhage from different injuries as the cause of death.
The victim, who has now been identified, was an employee of the PGI hospital located in the capital. The Victim was working as a nurse in the Nuclear Medicine Department of the PGI Hospital.
The victim, who hailed from Gorakhpur, was a widow and is survived by by two children.
Her husband died two years ago due to kidney failure.
Meanwhile, a panel of six doctors, which examined the body, has reportedly confirmed the gang-rape of the woman, and laceration in anal and vaginal areas.
The panel, which includes forensic experts and a female doctor, also noted a total of 12 injuries, abrasions and contusions on the corpse with maximum severity doled out below abdomen.
“Blunt objects such as wooden stick were thrust inside vaginal and anal area to inflict pain,“ a doctor from the panel was quoted as saying.
The panel has reportedly concluded that as the victim started bleeding excessively the men dragged her to a classroom and continued abusing her sexually.
The men seem to have dealt lathi blows on her face, chest and waist and on legs and drove a stick into her private parts.
The 25-year-old woman`s body, lying in a pool of blood, was spotted by local people just six kilometres from a village that former US president Bill Clinton had visited on Monday.
The police claimed that she was killed last night at the government-run school in the city`s Bahadurkheda area, where there had been tight security for Clinton`s visit.
The woman was allegedly stripped and stabbed several times. There were stab wounds even on her private parts, the police said after preliminary examination of the body.
The case reminds us of the horrific gang-rape and brutal torture of a young paramedical student by a group of six men in a moving car in the national capital in December 2012.
A spurt in gang-rapes and crimes against women in the Samajwadi Party-ruled state has ben a major cause of embarrassment for the Akhilesh Yadav government.
In May, two minor Dalit sisters` dead bodies were found hanging from a tree in the Badaun district. The girls, who were cousins, were allegedly gang-raped, beaten and hanged alive.
The Badaun case - which created headlines in the foreign media and evoked sharp criticism for the UP government - is still being probed.
