The recent report of a 16-year-old Indian girl who had been allegedly gang-raped and set on fire by two men in India has been updates has she had reportedly died in hospital.
The police had reported that the unfortunate girl was a Dalit which is the lowest rung in the Hindu caste system who also suffer disproportionately high levels of sexual violence in a country which has some high rates and statistics of crime against women.
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Her death on Monday would also be coming less than a week after two Dalit sisters who had been aged 15 and 17, had been found hanging from a tree after being allegedly sexually assaulted and murdered by six men.
Both incidents had taken place in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh which is also the home to about 230 million people, where similar crimes regularly make headlines.
In the latest case a girl from a rural area was allegedly attacked by two men and set on fire early this month and she was shifted to a hospital in the state capital Lucknow where she succumbed to her injuries on Monday.
“We arrested the accused within two hours of the incident being reported and assured the family of proper follow-up action against the perpetrators,” local police chief Dinesh Kumar Prabhu told AFP.
Prabhu said police had since been deployed around the girl’s house “to check any untoward incident”.
In previous cases low-caste families have been threatened or attacked to stop them from testifying.
Activists say police often fail to take seriously accusations made by the marginalised community and that they lack recourse to legal representation.