4 women gang-raped, man shot dead in Greater Noida

GREATER NOIDA: A gang of six men waylaid a car just a kilometre from the Yamuna expressway in Greater Noida in the early hours of Thursday, dragged its eight passengers to a field and allegedly gang-raped the four women among them.The four male passengers were made to squat, tied up execution-style with the women’s dupattas and thrashed before one of them, a 38-year-old scrap dealer, was shot in the chest from point-blank range because he had put up a resistance. He bled to death on the spot. His wife (35), sister (35) and sister-in-law (50) were among the women in the gang’s clutches. (TOI is withholding his name because rape charges are involved).The ambush, by planting spikes on the road to deflate the Eeco’s tyres, had a chilling similarity with last July’s attack on a Ghaziabad-based family in Bulandshahr in which a woman and her teenaged daughter were gang-raped, allegedly by the Bawariya gang. The place where that happened, a village called Dostpur, is barely 40km from the spot of Thursday night’s attack.The gang behind it, apparently a group of robbers, had scattered the spikes on a stretch of Sikandrabad-Jewar road in Sabota Mustfabad village, just off the Yamuna expressway in Jewar, and hid in the adjacent farmland waiting for a victim when the Eeco carrying the scrap dealer, his six family members, and the driver and his wife (32), drove past around 1.30am. The family was going to Bulandshahr to visit a relative who had given birth. The spikes punctured both right tyres of the Eeco, which came to a halt around half a kilometre ahead.Within minutes, the gang had surrounded them. The scrap dealer, his brother-in-law (40), nephew (25) and the driver were overpowered and dragged into the fields along with the women. They were rescued by a police team nearly two hours later, the cops alerted by Haneef, whose Eeco the scrap dealer had hired. He had managed to call Haneef to inform him of the breakdown before the robbers got to him.The family left their house, in Jewar village, around 1 am. “We were about 200 metres into Sabota village when we felt something strike the wheels of the car and heard a loud sound,” the scrap dealer’s brother-in-law later told TOI. “We wanted to get off and check but the driver did not stop and kept going for about half a kilometre. The he stopped as both right tyres were punctured. We called Haneef for a spare tyre,” he added.Haneef said he heard some noise in the background when he received the call. “Someone seemed to be ordering the family to follow them,” he said. The call then got disconnected. When he tried again, the phone was switched off.The brother-in-law said they were surrounded by six men, who were armed with guns, knives and rods. “They dragged us deep inside the fields in the dark and fired in the in air to scare us. They snatched our mobile phones, purses and whatever jewellery the women had on them. When they started groping the women, we resisted. My brother-in-law (the scrap dealer) put up a resistance. The criminals first fired a bullet into the ground and then shot him in the chest. We begged them to spare us so that we could admit him to hospital. We also told them we won’t report the matter to anybody but they did not listen. They were cruel and heartless,” he said.The scrap dealer’s nephew said once the gang had tied them with the women’s dupattas, they took the women deeper into the field and raped them. They then tied up the women and left.Haneef said when he failed to contact the family, he called the police. The police team was finally able to locate the victims around 3.30 am. Since the robbers did not wear masks, the victims were able to clearly describe the men to the cops.The four women were brought to the district hospital in Noida on Thursday morning and examined by a team of two senior gynaecologists for three hours. “Two of the women had marks on their hands and feet, which implied they had been tied up,” said Renu Agarwal, acting chief medical superintendent. “We have taken swab samples for tests,” she said. “They will be sent to a laboratory in Lucknow and if required to a more advance lab in Hyderabad,” she said. She refused to share the findings of the preliminary investigation.Noida police chief Love Kumar said a case of gang-rape, dacoity and murder had been registered against six unnamed persons at Jewar police station. “We have formed four teams comprising crime branch, special task force, special operations group, and local police. We are conducting raids to arrest the criminals,” he said.District magistrate B N Singh and IG Ram Kumar also visited the spot for investigation.The police have not ruled out a personal enmity angle to the ambush. “The victims’ family initially alleged involvement of some known persons. But they registered an FIR against unknown persons,” said a senior police officer.