A couple was murdered and a minor girl and her married cousin were allegedly gangraped by robbers who went on a rampage at Dingerheri village in Haryana’s Mewat district at wee hours of Thursday, said police.
According to the complaint filed by one of the family members, the accused entered the house around midnight. Male members of the family were sleeping in the courtyard, while women were sleeping in a room.
“We heard screams and rushed out to see. We saw five men, two in their undergarments and face covered, beating our family members with iron rods. They snatched our ‘dupattas’ to tie them to cots and gag them. The accused then entered our room and gang-raped two women, including a teenaged girl. They then searched the entire house for money,” said the complainant.
The men who had barged into the dwelling tied up the family members and hit them with iron rods and sticks. Three of them then took turns to rape the complainant, who is married, and her 16-year-old cousin. The six others are being treated in hospital.
Haryana Police suspect the crime may have been committed by one of the notorious kachcha-banian gangs whose members attack wearing only underclothes and often mask their faces. They rub lubricants on their body, which makes it hard for anyone to catch them.
The motive, prima facie, seemed to be a robbery as the gang took away whatever cash and jewellery there could find and a two-wheeler.
In that, it had a chilling similarity with the Bulandhahahr gang rapes with a gang of robbers accused of dragging a woman and her daughter out of a car travelling on a national highway and sexually assaulting them.
The farmland belongs to a Delhi resident who, police said, had leased it to the murdered man for farming. The house where the family lives -a concrete room with a thatched roof extension -is an isolated structure situated in the middle of a farmland, and is around 3km from the nearest village, Dingerheri.
