A tourist has alleged she was gang-raped and her partner was attacked while camping in India, sparking outrage and the arrests of three male suspects.
The woman, who has Brazilian-Spanish dual nationality, shared her account of the incident on Instagram, where the couple has drawn a large following tracking their motorcycle tour of Asia.
Police in India’s eastern state of Jharkhand, where the alleged incident took place, said that three men had been arrested and that they were hunting for four more.
The couple looked to have been beaten up when local police found them late Friday by a roadside, Pitamber Singh Kherwar, superintendent of police in the state’s Dumka district, told reporters Sunday.
“Since the victims were speaking in Spanish and English, our police officers could not properly understand what they were saying, but it looked like they were injured,” he said.
Kherwar said the couple, whose identities were not disclosed, were taken to a nearby hospital where doctors said the woman had been raped.
The three suspects were arrested Sunday, Kherwar said, adding that investigators had identified the four other men and they would be arrested “very soon.”
“Our priority is to get them maximum punishment so it is never repeated,” he added. Kherwar also said the couple will get compensation of up to $12,000.
The Indian National Commission for Women asked the police to charge those accused with gang rape, which is punishable by at least 20 years in prison, it said in a post on X on Saturday.
‘Something has happened to us’
“Something has happened to us that we would not wish on anyone,” the woman, who appeared with bruises on her face, said through tears in a video posted on her Instagram page, which has almost half a million followers.
“Seven men have raped me, they have beaten us and robbed us,” she said, according to an accompanying caption in English. The video is no longer available.
In a separate video posted Sunday on their joint Instagram page, which has over 250,000 followers, the couple said that “the police are doing everything possible to catch them. They already know who they are.”
They added: “We ask that justice be done, not only for us but also for all the other women and girls who have gone through this.”
In an interview with the Spanish TV channel Antena 3, the couple said the men raped the woman and hit her partner repeatedly.
“They raped me, they took turns while some watched and they stayed like that for about two hours,” the woman said in the interview, adding that they had decided to camp in the town since they found no hotels to stay at overnight.
NBC News is not naming the couple due to laws in India that prevent disclosing the identities of sexual assault victims. NBC News has reached out to the couple for comment.
The woman was on a motorbike trip with her Spanish partner, the Brazilian Embassy in New Delhi told NBC News in a statement, saying it had registered its “strong repudiation of the barbaric crime against the couple.”
They are being “looked after by the Indian emergency services,” the statement added.
The Spanish foreign ministry told NBC News that its embassy in New Delhi had been in contact with the couple to provide any consular assistance.
The couple had been documenting their trip to more than 200,000 followers on their joint Instagram account, with recent posts from neighboring Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
In their post on Sunday, they added that they had camped in 66 countries, many of which are considered “dangerous.”
“This can happen to any traveler, anyone,” they said.
Prominent Indian celebrities reacted to the incident, calling for the seven suspects to be swiftly apprehended. It was a “shameful act that we MUST show will not be tolerated,” Emmy winner and comedian Vir Das said in a post on X on Sunday.
Despite stringent laws, India has long struggled to tackle male violence against women.
An average of 86 rape cases were registered every day in the country in 2022, according to a report by the National Crime Records Bureau. However, many women still do not report cases of sexual violence to the authorities, especially in rural areas, where a stigma persists that such a disclosure may affect a family’s social standing.
In 2013, a year after the fatal gang rape of a young woman in the capital, New Delhi, authorities doubled the prison term for rapists to 20 years, criminalized acts such as stalking and voyeurism, and lowered the age at which a person can be tried as an adult from 18 to 16.
But under current Indian laws, marital rape is still not a crime as long as the woman is above the age of 18.