Kerala: Probe ordered into humiliation of rape survivor by cops
Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala police was forced into action on Friday after a 35-year-old rape survivor revealed the horrors she had to suffer at the hands of the authorities when she approached to them lodge a complaint.
Speaking to reporters, Kerala DGP said that a probe has been ordered to look into the allegations made by the rape survivor. “We have taken her allegations seriously, and have asked high-level investigating team to probe the incident from scratch,” Kerala DGP Loknath Behera said.
Another simultaneous enquiry has been launched to investigate the police’s conduct with the rape survivor, he added.
The woman, who was allegedly gang-raped by her husband’s friends, was forced to withdraw her complaint against the culprits because the police allegedly ridiculed her and asked her lewd questions about the incident.
The incident came to light after famous dubbing artist Bhagyalakshmi came out with the gruelling details in the case through a Facebook post.
The survivor alleged that her four rapists included a politician with high connections.
When she attempted to lodge a complaint, a police man reportedly asked her, “Whom did you enjoy most?”
"One day, a woman called me. She was crying. When I asked her who she was, she said that she wanted to meet me. Shortly, a woman aged around 35 came to meet me. The woman told me that she had two kids and that her husband was an alcoholic," narrated Bhagyalakshmi in her post.
"One day, four of her husband’s friends came to her saying that her husband had some health problem and he was admitted to a hospital. She was asked to go along with them. However, when the car took a different route, she raised an alarm. She was forcefully silenced, taken to a house in a remote area outside the city and gang-raped. They threatened her claiming that the whole incident had been videographed.
"If she reported it to someone, the video will be made public, they said."
After three months, when the husband noticed some abnormality in her behaviour, he questioned her and realised the facts. When they went to the police station, the police officials summoned the four accused and asked her intimate questions.
“This humiliation was more than what happened when I was raped,” the post quoted her as saying.