3rd accused held, Mumbai rape victim says ‘I want to get back to work’

Three of the five men wanted for the gang-rape of a young photojournalist in Mumbai have been arrested. After the first suspect was arrested on Friday, two other men were located by the police on Saturday.

The sexual assault in the heart of Mumbai, usually considered one of India’s safest cities for women, has triggered outrage across the country.

The survivor, a 22-year-old who was working with a an English magazine, remains in hospital and is recovering well from internal and external injuries, said doctors attending to her. ‘Rape is not the end of life; I want to get back to work,’ she is reported to have said to Nirmala Samant Prabhawalkar, a member of the National Commission for Women, who visited her in hospital.

Meanwhile, Chand Sheikh, the first suspect to be arrested, has been incorrectly described by the police as a 19-year-old, his grandmother alleged. She said she will go to court if she has to in order to establish that he is 16, which would entitle him to a trial in a court for juveniles.

Chand’s grandmother met a TV news channel at the small home where she lives with Chand in a slum near Shakti Mill, where the young woman was assaulted with such unrelenting savagery.

She was on assignment with a male colleague in South Mumbai when two members of the gang approached them and struck up a conversation. The woman’s friend was tied up with a belt. The gang-members then phoned their three friends to join them, the police said.

The woman has told the police that her attackers held a broken beer bottle above her head to deter her from shouting for help. Twice, she disconnected calls on her cellphone from her mother.

The attack has underscored how vulnerable women remain in India’s biggest cities despite the introduction of a tougher anti-rape law to punish sexual crimes that was introduced after a young woman was fatally gang-raped on a bus in Delhi in December, provoking massive street protests.