On 5th January a body of a 19-year-old Dalit woman was found hanging from a banyan tree in Saira Village, Gujarat. According to the postmortem reports, she was kidnapped, gang-raped and murdered before her body was found hanging by the tree.
According to a report in The Hindu, the accused hanged the body of the victim from the tree to make it look like a suicide. The victim had gone missing on 31st December.
According to The National Herald, the family approached the local police to file an FIR on 3rd January but the police refused. Inspector NL Rabri, told the family that the girl had eloped with a boy from the same community and insisted that she was ‘safe’.
The family refused to claim the body until an FIR was filed, they believed that the accused was murdered.
It was only on Tuesday, two days after the body was found that the police officially registered an FIR against four men, Bimal Bharvad, Darshan Bharvard, Satish Bharvard and Jigar in this case. Gandhinagar Range Inspector, General Mayansilh Chavda further added:
We have lodged the FIR on the basis of complaint given by the family of the deceased. Our investigation is under way.
With an aim to spread awareness and bring justice to the victim, netizens have taken to Twitter using a trending hashtag:
*Images of tweets are sourced directly from Twitter . The hashtag has been blurred to conceal the identity of the victim.*