BANGALORE: A court in southern India handed down life sentences yesterday to six men for the gang rape of a law student on a university campus last year.
The six were also ordered to pay a fine totalling 6,000 rupees (around $90) to the 21-year-old victim from Nepal over the injuries and trauma she suffered in the attack last October in Bangalore.
Sessions judge K Sangannavar told the court the men would be sent to prison “till their natural death”.
On October 13, the law student had been walking with a male companion in a secluded area of the Bangalore campus when a group of eight approached them. The woman was attacked after her companion was beaten up.
The judge, who found the group guilty earlier in the week, said they deserved the maximum sentence as their crime “involved not just the physical torture, but also the mental trauma of the victim that won’t go away for a long time”.
A seventh suspect is being tried in a juvenile court while the eighth is still on the run. The six convicted, who were all residents of a nearby rural area, were arrested within a week of the assault.
The woman abandoned her studies after the assault and returned to Nepal.
In Mumbai, police said three of the men accused of gang-raping a photographer had allegedly raped a teenager in the same spot just weeks earlier.
Sketches of suspects in the attack on the photographer, published in the media, prompted a 19-year-old telephone operator to come forward to say she was raped there at the end of July by three of the same men, along with two others, police said.
AFP
