Woman says she was attacked at a police station in Uttar Pradesh after going there to seek her husband's release
Agence France-Press in Lucknow
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A protest in Kolkata against rape after a string of violent attacks in India.
Photograph: Piyal Adhikary/EPA
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The woman said she was attacked when she went to the station
overnight on Monday in the Hamirpur district to seek her husband's release.
"At 11.30pm when there was no one in the room the
sub-inspector took me to his room and raped me inside the police station,"
the woman told CNN-IBN.
She filed a complaint with a senior officer on Wednesday
over the attack, which allegedly occurred when she refused to pay a bribe to
secure the release of her husband. Virendra Kumar Shekhar, a police official
from Hamirpur, said: "The procedure will be followed. The victim has filed
a complaint and the guilty will be arrested soon."
Sub-inspector Balbir Singh said a criminal case had been
lodged against four officers from the station.
The
case is the latest in a string of rapes and murders in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, where the chief
minister, Akhilesh Yadav, is under growing political pressure over his handling
of law and order.
Last month, two girls, aged 12 and 14, were gang-raped and
lynched in their village. They were attacked after going into a field to
relieve themselves at night because they did not have a lavatory at home.
Their families refused
to cut the bodies down from the tree for hours in protest, saying police had
failed to take action against the attackers because the girls were from a low
caste.
The prime minister,
Narendra Modi, , in his first comments on the issue since the
hanging of the girls sparked public outrage, on Wednesday urged all politicians
to work together to protect women. Modi warned politicians against
"politicising rape", saying they were "playing with
the dignity of women" in his first speech to parliament since sweeping to
power at last month's election.
India
brought in tougher laws last
year against sexual offenders after the fatal gang-rape of a student in New
Delhi in December 2012, but they have failed to stem the tide of violence
against women.
Also on Wednesday, a 45-year-old woman was found hanging
from a tree in Uttar Pradesh. Her family said she had been raped and murdered.
A police officer said five men were being questioned over the incident, which
occurred several kilometres from her home in Bahraich district. "They [her
husband and son] have alleged that the woman, before being strung up from the
tree, was raped and murdered by these men," the district superintendent
Happy Guptan told AFP.
View from streets of Brazil's largest city confirms what
many fear: tournament simply illuminates gulf between rich and poor
By Owen Gibson
From a hillside above traffic-choked São
Paulo, the residents of the Copa do Povo (People's Cup) flash camp can see the
gleaming £180m stadium that will host the opening match of the 2014 World Cup. Despite the Brazilian flag fluttering
over the makeshift tents, the camp organiser, Helena Santos, says the stadium
might as well be on the moon.
"Most
people here are revolted. No one wants to see the games. There's no excitement
here," she says, looking across to the Arena de São Paulo, which was
supposed to have been a catalyst for the regeneration of the Itaquerao area.
The
final touches are being put to the stadium. Sponsors have begun
"activating" their £890m investment – Visa cash machines have been
installed alongside Coca-Cola fridges and bars serving Budweiser. But with no
sign of other promised infrastructure upgrades in the area many residents are
merely furious that they can't pass freely through the surrounding streets.
To them, it is just another symbol of
what the Movimento do
Trabalhadores Sem Teto(the homeless workers' movement MTST) calls the
"tyranny" and "terrorism" of Fifa.
"If it wasn't for us, all anybody in Brazil would
see is Fifa," says Gianna, busy organising the kitchen rota to feed some
of the camp's 5,000 residents. "We don't have hospitals, we don't have
schools. But we have stadiums. Lots of stadiums."
Inside,
the Brazilian national football team trained on the pitch where they will play
Croatia for the first time. In front of a huge media scrum, the pressure on the
slender shoulders of Neymar and his teammates became clear.
At
the Fifa Congress, in a heavily guarded conference centre, the embattled Fifa
president, Sepp Blatter, shrugged off corruption claims and insisted his
organisation was "shaping society". Brazil's executive committee
member José Maria Marin declared that the "party is about to begin",
promising an "unforgettable" World Cup that would be the "best
of all time".
In
central São Paulo, Blatter has been gliding through the gridlock with a police
escort, shuttling between five-star hotels as he tries to shore up support for
his bid for a fifth presidential term amid a new avalanche of corruption
claims.
Greg
Dyke, the FA chairman who landed in São Paulo and walked straight into a storm
over Blatter's claims that the British media was "racist" for
investigating how Qatar was elected to host the 2022 World Cup, was not the
only one struck by the lack of hoopla in a city that is football mad and hosts
Brazil's World Cup opener on Thursday.
Billboards
are banned, so Fifa's sponsors have been unable to festoon the city with
adverts. Public proclamations of support are few, although more flags were
starting to sprout from balconies and car aerials on Wednesday. The contrast
with the tens of thousands who mobbed central Johannesburg, honking on
vuvuzelas, before kick-off at the last World Cup, is stark.
Back
at the shanty town that organisers claim houses 5,000 homeless workers,
27-year-old Adeilson Freitas is leaning on the counter of a makeshift kitchen
block and painstakingly filing sick notes from those unable to attend a recent
demonstration.
"We
don't mind having foreigners here, in fact the idea of a World Cup is quite
good. But this one is not for Brazilians," said Freitas, who says he
avidly followed Brazil's progress in previous campaigns but will only tune in
to this one "if I'm not busy". " Perhaps it would have been a
good idea to have it in 2034, when it could be organised properly," he
says.
The
World Cup, which has seen costs soar to more than £6.5bn as the Brazilian
government has raced to complete promised infrastructure, has become both a
focal point for demands for basic amenities and a symbol of Brazil's
inequality.
The
Copa do Povo camp was set up around a month ago to focus attention on the
plight of those forced out of their homes by real estate speculators, who
campaigners claim have more than tripled rents in the area around the stadium.
The camp occupies a corner of land owned by a construction company that went
bankrupt. A maze of makeshift tents constructed from plastic sheeting and
wooden poles, it is one of 14 that have sprung up around São Paulo alone – one
houses 8,000 families, according to Santos, who describes herself as a
"mum Che Guevara", juggling looking after five children with
organising the camp.
She
accepts the World Cup has brought the issues faced by Brazil's landless and
homeless to the eyes of the world. "It helped because it brought the
focus. You had the stadium being built here and you had the World Cup happening
and just a few metres away you had people living like this. So it helped in a
certain way," she admits.The traffic jams snaking down São Paulo's clogged
arteries have become the least of Fifa's worries. Yet Corinthians fans, one of
Brazil's biggest clubs yet without a permanent home, have welcomed the public
money that has been invested in the new stadium. Like many things about this
World Cup, it is a complex brew.
Both
for the homeless workers setting up protest camps and the burgeoning middle
class struggling to pay for education and healthcare, a range of pressing
issues have been bound up in a distaste for Fifa, the corporate world and the
corruption of their own football officials. The city's 11m residents are used
to the hellish traffic and the helicopters queuing to deliver the city's super
rich. "The World Cup is for those in helicopters," laughs one of the
camp residents.
Despite
the cramped conditions, the camp is safe and clean. Each plastic sheet bears a
number and the name of a family, and a strict register is kept of who is in the
camp and who attends demonstrations.
In the Grand Hyatt, where most Fifa
executive committee members are staying, officials have vainly battled to
launch a PR counter-offensive to salvage Fifa's battered reputation, but the
MTST has been mobilising a far more effective campaign. It has paid off. The
federal government, the government of São Paulo and the city of São Paulo this
week agreed to build 4,000 affordable homes on the site as an extension of
President Dilma Rousseff's social housing programme, Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life).
"The
economic boom was only for the big businesses and the banks," says Santos.
"Here, our salaries aren't increasing, we don't have places to live, we
don't have clothes to wear. Now we've got this victory here, we can go to other
camps and get a similar result."
In
the camp, a big fiesta was planned for Wednesday night – not to celebrate the
start of the World Cup opener but their success in negotiating the housing
deal.
Above
the warren of fluttering plastic and muddy pathways, the Brazilian flag flies
alongside the red one of the MTST.
