In a chilling parallel to the Nirbhaya case, a 16-year-old class-11 student from Uttar Pradesh was allegedly gang-raped inside an empty, moving sleeper bus in a nearly 47-kilometre journey of horror that ended at Delhi’s Kashmere Gate in the first week of August, police said on Monday, August 31. The bus’s driver and conductor were arrested for the alleged assault that happened on the night of Tuesday, August 4.
The bus, bearing registration number UP 83 ET 3789, had curtains covering its sleeper berths and seats when the crime took place on the empty berths. Citing the teenager’s accounts, investigating officials of Delhi Police said the conductor and driver of the bus deliberately gave her wrong information that the vehicle was heading for Noida Sector 63. The empty bus was, in fact, returning from a workshop in Greater Noida’s Surajpur and heading to Timarpur.
Also WATCH: Frightening visuals from Nepal’s devastating floods: Read the story and watch the videos
The teenager, who was travelling from her home in Mainpuri district to Noida—a distance of about 318 km—to visit her cousin, was gang-raped inside the running bus and then dropped on the Ring Road near Kashmere Gate in Delhi. She approached Kashmere Gate police station soon and lodged a complaint about the gang-rape soon afterwards. Sandeep, the conductor, and Kuldeep, the driver, were arrested the same day, said officials.
Having left her home in Mainpuri by another bus for Noida to visit her cousin living there, the girl had got off at Pari Chowk, some 25 km off Noida, by mistake at around 9 PM after feeling disoriented due to heavy rain and darkness. Upon realising that where she had got down was not Noida and that she was stranded, she waited there on the street, hoping to find a bus heading to Noida. But she was unable to find any onward transport and flagged down the passing sleeper bus that was empty. The driver of this bus told her it was headed to Noida’s Sector 63 and let her board, said police officials.
Also read: I know you love handloom sarees, but handloom has to be a way of life beyond sarees
Instead of covering the 25-km distance to Noida from Pari Chowk, the bus covered 47 km up to Kashmere Gate in Delhi, and the gangrape allegedly took place in the running vehicle in the course of this distance.
Once the teenager got into the bus, the conductor, Sandeep, allegedly began making inappropriate advances toward her. The girl told police that both the driver and the conductor then assaulted her, threatening to kill her if she resisted. After abandoning her on Ring Road, near the Kashmere Gate bus terminal, late at night, and the two men fled in their bus.
Also read: Death of woman, 32, due to bad roads in Bengaluru causes grief and fury in India’s Silicon Valley
“The terrified teenager approached Kashmere Gate police and reported the assault. We started an investigation that led officers to the accused within hours. We identified the accused as the bus’s driver, Kuldeep, and conductor, Sandeep, and arrested them in a bus parking area in Timarpur. The vehicle was seized and sent for forensic examination as part of the probe,” said an official of Delhi Police.
The bus had broken down some time earlier and had been towed to a workshop in Surajpur for repairs. The driver and conductor were reportedly ferrying the now-repaired, empty vehicle to Timarpur when they crossed paths with the stranded student at Pari Chowk.
Police said the CCTV footage from the route taken by the bus has been retrieved and that a forensics team has found strands of the girl’s hair inside the bus, which has since been seized. “The case remains under investigation. The forensic results from the bus is expected to form a key part of the evidence,” said a police official. No further details about the medical examination or formal charges have been released publicly so far.
