Sentence them to death, says husband of woman gangraped by 8 men in Mumbai

Mumbai: The husband of the 32-year-old woman who was gangraped in Mumbai’s Amboli on Tuesday, has sought death penalty for the accused.

According to a report in the DNA, the husband said that when the 8 accused men barged into the shanty, he had no idea why they were doing so.

"I did not know they were intentionally holding me so that they could gangrape my wife. They assaulted me and when I managed to get out from the clutches of the youths, I saw my wife being exploited and they kept on hitting her with hands and legs,” he reportedly said.

Pointing out that they were habitual offenders, local dwellers meanwhile said that they fear another such episode and want the families of the accused youth to clear out of the area.

The local community was in for a shock when the police, late Tuesday, swooped down on the slum and rounded up the young men. After getting to know that his friends were arrested, one of the accused even managed to stay at large for a while, before he was eventually captured.

"We were shocked and did not believe at first that they can gang rape a woman until the cops took them away in their vans," a resident was quoted as saying.

The rape survivor, who had visited the area in the afternoon with her husband to hunt for an accommodation, decided to put up at her relative's place. The survivor’s husband had recently got a job in the area and in order to reduce travel time, wanted to move to Amboli. They contacted the survivor's aunt, who stays in a shanty in Shyam Nagar, to help them find a house.

The aunt, who works night shifts, left for work around 9 pm. Around 10.30 pm, the accused barged into the house and allegedly took turns to rape the woman, in an ordeal that lasted over two hours. While five accused remained inside the house, three others thrashed and dragged her husband to a spot far away.