Manipur: In the ghastly incident that took place in May this year, two women, one in her 20s and the other in her 40s, from the Kuki-Zomi community, were made to walk naked down a road and towards a field by a mob of men.
Amid the uproar, reports quoted one of the victims as claiming they were “left to the mob by the police” while another said that the inebriated men raped them as an act of “revenge” over a fake post.
According to a report by the Indian Express, the victims filed a police complaint on May 18, the victims where they said that the younger woman was “brutally gang raped in broad daylight”.
In the complaint, the victims said they had fled to a forest for shelter after their village in Kangpokpi district was attacked by a mob and they were later rescued by Thoubal police. They were stopped on the way by a mob when they were being taken to the police station, and were seized from police custody around two kilometres away from the police station, the Indian Express report said citing the complaint.
The IE report quoted the younger woman as alleging, “The police were there with the mob which was attacking our village. The police picked us up from near home, and took us a little away from the village and left us on the road with the mob. We were given to them by police.”
The victims in the police complaint stated that there were five of them together including the two women seen in the video, another woman in her 50s who was also allegedly stripped, as well as the father and brother of the youngest woman, who the victims claimed were killed by the mob.
“After all the men were killed, and the mob did what they did, we were just left there and we escaped,” she said, as quoted by IE.
The media report mentioned her saying that she and her family were not aware of the existence of a video capturing the incident, which sparked outrage and also led to police action two months after the FIR was filed.
“There is no internet here in Manipur, we wouldn’t know,” she was quoted as saying, talking from her husband’s house in a phone conversation.
The victim said there were “too many” men who were part of the mob, but she was able to recognise a few of them. She stated that one of them was a friend of her brother’s.
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