Police raid apartment in Gurgaon after receiving tipoff from NGO over allegations that two women had been held at flat and gang-raped

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The Saudi Arabian embassy in India has denied allegations that one of its senior diplomats kept two domestic servants captive in a flat where they were repeatedly gang-raped.



Police raided an apartment in Gurgaon, a satellite town of the capital, Delhi, on Monday and freed the two women after receiving a tipoff from a local NGO, local media reported.

Both women were from remote rural areas of Nepal and had been sent to Delhi this year by agents in their home country who had promised them well-paid jobs in the Gulf, campaigners said.

Vijay Lama, an NGO worker involved in the case, said the pair had spent two weeks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before being brought back to Delhi by their employer, a senior diplomat at the kingdom’s embassy to India.

The abuse is said to have started on their return to India and continued until the women, aged 20 and 40, were seen by a newly recruited domestic servant who told campaigners who then informed authorities, according to police.

“These women were held in [a] seven-star living condominium … for the past one-and-a-half months. The flat owner, reportedly a Saudi national, used to sexually assault the victims,” Rajesh Kumar, an assistant commissioner of police in Gurgaon, told the local Mail Today newspaper.

The two women flew back to Nepal on Wednesday night.

Police have launched an official investigation into offences under laws on gang-rape, rape, “unnatural sex” and abduction. In statements before a local magistrate, the women claimed to have been raped first by their employer then by up to six men at once, to have been denied food and drinking water, and to have been threatened with violence. They repeated their claims to local media.

The Saudi embassy in Delhi dismissed the allegations as “completely false” and “contrary to facts in our possession”, the Indian news agency IANS reported.

No arrests have been made.

Trafficking in south Asia is a major problem, with Gulf countries a growing destination for networks. Many victims come from Nepal, though others are Indian.

In July, police at Delhi’s main airport detained two airline staff and two suspected traffickers. They also took 21 young Nepalese women into their care, seven from the airport itself – where they were being led onto a flight to Dubai – and the rest from a hotel nearby. Most of the women were from areas devastated by April’s earthquake in Nepal.

Lama said the two women were part of a group of more than 30 brought by agents from Kathmandu this year and sent to the Gulf. The whereabouts of other members of the group were unknown.