Delhi: Police file rape case after dying confession from 16-year-old girl

The victim’s sister, 22, said that the minor girl had run away from home over a year ago when she was fifteen after a fight with her parents who refused to let her marry a man who she wanted to because she was underage. The family members could not find her.

Police have registered a case of rape and sexual assault after a 16-year-old girl, found a year after she ran away from home, in her dying statement alleged that she had been forcibly married to a man in Rajasthan who sexually abused and tortured her for months.

The minor girl died in northeast Delhi’s Mustafabad on December 12 after prolonged illness caused by acute tuberculosis (TB).

The minor girl died in northeast Delhi’s Mustafabad on December 12 after prolonged illness caused by acute tuberculosis (TB). Before her death, she told her family that, after she left home, a woman from Bhajanpura persuaded her to come home with her where she was kept for five months.

“The woman then took her to Rajasthan’s Tonk and married her to a 23-year-old local man, who raped her multiple times, assaulted and threatened her whenever she protested,” her sister told HT.

On a complaint by her parents, police have registered a first information report (FIR) under sections 6 (aggravated penetrative sexual assault) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and sections 64 (rape), 115 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 351 (criminal intimidation) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) on Friday, at least two police officers aware of the matter said, requesting anonymity.

“We are investigating the case and are trying to identify and nab the suspects whose names the girl gave to her family members before her death,” one of the officers said.

The victim’s sister, 22, said that the minor girl had run away from home over a year ago when she was fifteen after a fight with her parents who refused to let her marry a man who she wanted to because she was underage. The family members could not find her.

On October 29, the family received information from the local police she had been found wandering the streets in Haryana’s Panipat and was in poor health. She later told her family that she had fled the house of the 23-year-old man on October 23 and travelled to Panipat on a bus.

The family got her back to Delhi from a shelter home there and took her to a hospital in Karawal Nagar for treatment. The doctors told them that she was suffering from TB and the infection had spread in her lungs. She died earlier this month.

The girl is survived by her parents and seven siblings. Her father is a rickshaw-puller while her mother and siblings work in different factories for livelihood.