New Delhi: A day after a 13-year-old girl in Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur district filed a gang-rape case against three men, her father was killed in a road accident on Wednesday morning, outside the hospital where she had been taken for an examination, NDTV reported.
Two of the accused in the gang-rape case – Deepu Yadav and Saurabh Yadav – are sons of a sub-inspector in the Uttar Pradesh Police. A third accused, Golu Yadav, has been arrested, according to NDTV.
The girl’s family has accused the police of shielding the alleged rapists and also not acting on the family’s complaints of threats and harassment. “My son has been murdered… the police is complicit,” the girl’s grandfather – and father of the man who died – said, according to NDTV.
Other family members had reportedly told reporters on Tuesday that they were facing threats from the accused. “As soon as we filed the complaint, the elder brother of the main accused started threatening us. ‘Beware, my father is a sub inspector,’ he told us,” a family member said.
Kanpur police chief Preetinder Singh said the police has filed an accident case and is probing the matter. “While the medical examination was on, the father stepped out for a cup of tea. At the time, we have learnt that he was involved in a truck accident. He was rushed to a Kanpur hospital, but he has died. We have filed an accident case and we are investigating,” he said.
On Tuesday, a case of gang-rape and criminal intimidation had been filed based on the girl’s father’s complaint, the police said.
The girl’s father’s death led to large-scale outrage, and the UP police chief took to Twitter to ask the Kanpur police to look into both cases swiftly.
घटना से सम्बन्धित दुष्कर्म के अभियोग में मुख्य अभियुक्त गोलू यादव की गिरफ्तारी की जा चुकी है, तथा अज्ञात वाहन से हुई दुर्घटना में वाहन की बरामदगी व ड्राइवर की गिरफ्तारी हेतु अ0 पु0 अधीक्षक के नेतृत्व में कई टीमों का गठन कर अन्य सभी आरोपियों की शीघ्र गिरफ्तारी सुनिश्चित की जायेगी।
— Kanpur Nagar Police (@kanpurnagarpol) March 10, 2021