A 17-year-old girl from Chhattisgarh who had eloped with her boyfriend and landed at the Pune railway station was allegedly confined and raped for days by a Railway Protection Force (RPF) head constable and a staffer with a support group operating for distressed kids and elderly at the station.
The alleged crime happened between September 12 and 17 in the rooms in the railway colony the child support group uses, said the police.
The case was transferred to the Pune Government Railway Police (GRP) on September 30 by the Chhattisgarh Police. The Pune GRP arrested one of the accused in the case. The girl filed the complaint with the local police station in Chhattisgarh after returning home following the alleged assaults and confinement that lasted for over a week.
The victim, a Class 10 student in the Bemetara district in Chhattisgarh, fled with her 25-year-old boyfriend, who promised marriage, on September 9, 2023, from her aunt’s house. The couple reached Pune on September 12.
“At the Pune railway station, we were approached by three people who took us to a uniformed policeman…. We were made to sit at the police station for a long time by the policeman. We were then taken to a room in the railway colony and were locked there,” the victim said in her statement.
Later, the policemand visited them in the room in civilian clothes, she said. He connected her with her family over cellphone after taking her parents’ number, she added.
“He returned to the room at 1.30 am and sexually assaulted me. I was then again taken to the other room where my friend was locked,” she said.
She said the next day (September 13), another person, a staffer at an NGO visited them. He allegedly sexually assaulted her after taking her to a separate room and demanded Rs 6,000 from the couple, which the boy arranged by calling up a friend back home.
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The woman alleged that the two repeatedly raped her until September 17, when her family visited Pune and took her back to Chhattisgarh. She shared the information about the assaults with the police and later recorded her statement in the presence of a judge.
An FIR was lodged at the local police station and later transferred to the Pune railway police. The two ‘unidentified persons’ have been booked under sections 343 (Wrongful confinement for three or more days), 450 (House-trespass in order to commit offence punishable with imprisonment for life), 384 (extortion), 376 (2) (N)[rape by one or more in a group], 506 (criminal intimidation), 34C (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code and sections 4, 6 and 8, all dealing with sexual assault, of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act.
Additional Superintendent of Police (GRP) Ganesh Shinde said the police arrested the NGO staffer and were looking for the constable. “The Chhattisgarh Police have informed us that the boy with whom the girl had eloped had also been booked by the local police and arrested,” Shinde said.
