Indian Police have arrested one of five suspects accused of gang-raping a teenage girl inside a local government office in eastern India, an officer said Tuesday.
The 16-year-old victim was attacked after arriving in eastern Bihar state late Sunday where the gang, including a local administrator’s driver, approached her and offered her a lift to a relative’s home.
Instead they took her to a nearby local government office in Muzaffarpur district and raped her.
The victim, who hails from the eastern state of West Bengal, later escaped and filed a police complaint on Monday.
“Five men, mostly youths, forcibly dragged her to a nearby building of the (district) collectorate and gang-raped her till early Monday,” Naseem Ahmad, a senior district police officer, told a foreign news agency.
Police chief Ranjit Kumar Mishra said that they had “arrested one accused so far and … are working to arrest the other four”.
The case is the latest in a string of violent sex attacks against women in the world’s second most populous country.
In another case in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state, one of two police officers accused of raping a teenage girl was reportedly arrested on Tuesday.
The December 31 incident took place in Badaun district when the two policemen picked up the 14-year-old as she stepped out to relieve herself.
Badaun was thrown into the spotlight last May when two teenage girls, who were initially thought to have been gang-raped, were found hanging from a tree.
The incident sparked uproar in India, echoing the outrage over the fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi in 2012.