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EPA
Rapes have continued unabated despite a change in India’s rape laws
A 13-year-old girl has been raped and murdered in India.
Her body was found in a sugar field in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police said on Saturday. Two neighbors in the village have been arrested.
Police denied the father’s account that his daughter had escaped her eyes and cut her tongue.
Reporting and sexual violence have been in the spotlight in India since the rape and murder of a young woman in 2012 in a bus in the capital, Delhi.
That attack led to huge protests and changes in the country’s rape laws, but there has been no sign of crimes against women and girls declining.
According to recent crime figures, one in four rape victims in India is a child. In an overwhelming number of rape cases, the victims know the criminals.
The latest incident happened late on Friday in the village of Pakaria in the Lakhimpur Kheri district, police said.
The family went to look for their daughter after she failed to recover from a toilet outbreak in the fields.
They say they found her body mutilated.
But police said the post-mortem had concluded that she died to stranger after she was raped – but not that her eyes were blinded or that her tongue was pinched.
“There were scratches on the eyes, probably due to the sharp sugar leaves where the body was found,” said political spokeswoman Satendra Kumar.
A former member of the opposition Congress party, Jitin Prasada, condemned the attack as “sad”.
“The inhuman treatment of a girl has disgraced humanity,” he said, according to the Times of India newspaper.
The incident comes months after the case of a six-year-old girl who was abducted and raped outside her home in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
The attacker sustained serious injuries to the child’s eyes, in an apparent attempt to stop her from identifying with him.
In February, a 25-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a five-year-old girl at the U.S. Embassy in Delhi.
In November last year, the gang raped and murdered a 27-year-old veterinarian in the southern city of Hyderabad worldwide headlining and launching protests.
