NEW DELHI, DEC 18 -
A court on Tuesday sentenced three Nepalese citizens to 20 years in jail for the gang- rape of a US tourist in June, an attack that fuelled worries over the safety of foreign travellers.
A district judge handed down the punishment at the end of a trial for the three men in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, police said in a statement.
The judge ordered the three “to undergo rigorous imprisonment for 20 years,” Vinod Kumar Dhawan, who headed the police team investigating the assault, said in the statement.
The men, who were arrested two days after the attack, were held guilty of rape , robbery and criminal conspiracy.
“The prosecution has established the role of each of the accused in the commission of the horrific crime,” Dhawan, the district police superintendent, said.
The sentence, meted out six months after the attack, comes one day after India marked the one-year anniversary of the fatal gang- rape of a student that drew global attention to sex crimes against women in India.
The 23-year-old student died of her injuries two weeks after the attack on a moving bus in Delhi by a pack of six men. Four of the adult attackers have been sentenced to death in the case.
The savage attack spurred intense debate about the way India treats its women, and led to a toughening of punishments for sexual crimes, including doubling the minimum prison sentence for gang- rape to 20 years.
In June, the US woman, 30, had accepted a lift in a truck at night in Manali, a tourist destination in the foothills of the Himalayas, after struggling to find a taxi to return to her hotel.
The American, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, told police the truck driver and his two accomplices took her to a secluded spot where they rape d her for over an hour.
She gave police a description of the men and also identified the truck model, which is commonly used to transport construction materials in the state.
The prosecution linked “each thread of scientific, physical and circumstantial evidence” to prove the guilt of the accused, the police statement said.
The attack on the tourist was one of a series of assaults on foreigners visiting India this year.
In March, a 39-year-old Swiss cyclist holidaying with her husband in the central state of Madhya Pradesh was gang- rape d by six men, all of whom were sentenced to life imprisonment three months later.
Last week, police in the holiday state of Goa said they had arrested an Indian yoga teacher accused of raping a 33-year-old German tourist.
A survey in April found the number of foreign female tourists visiting India had dropped by 35% over a three-month period following the Delhi gang- rape and a spate of other sex attacks.
Also yesterday, the Kerala High Court upheld a lower court’s judgment of awarding death sentence to a rapist.
The court said there was no reason to alter the Thrissur Fast Track Court judgment of November 11, 2011 which sentenced Govind Chamiya, a resident of Tamil Nadu, to death for the brutal rape of a 23-year-old woman.
The victim was travelling in a women’s compartment of the Ernakulam-Shornur passenger train.
The brutal incident took place on February 1, 2011, when the victim was assaulted and thrown out of the moving train. The accused also jumped out and hit the victim’s head with a stone after raping her.
The victim died in a hospital on February 6.
The court came down hard on fellow passengers who did not come to her help and said their mindset was comparable to that of the criminal. The court also slammed the Indian Railways for not providing armed women security guards in women’s compartment.
The victim’s mother was in tears yesterday and thanked the judiciary for giving justice to her daughter.
Ram Singh committed suicide: report
The main accused in the 2012 Delhi gang- rape case committed suicide, according to the report of a judicial inquiry, a newspaper report said yesterday. Ram Singh, 33, the driver of the bus in which a 23-year-old was gang- rape d on December 16, 2012, was found hanged in his jail cell on March 11. His family members and lawyers had alleged Singh was murdered and a judicial inquiry was ordered into the incident. The probe report, submitted to the police and Tihar Jail authorities, ruled out foul play, the Times of India newspaper reported, citing unidentified sources. Jail officials refused to comment. A postmortem found no injuries on the victim’s body, internal or external, other than the ligature mark on his neck, the paper reported. All of Singh’s organs were healthy and his clothes were found intact.
