Over four years after the infamous Park Street gangrape case, Kolkata Police has arrested the prime accused Kader Khan from Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad district.
Kader, who had been absconding the law for almost 4 years now was arrested last night, along with his accomplice Ali Khan by a special team of Kolkata Police in a joint operation with Delhi Police. The duo had been hiding in an apartment in Ghaziabad which they had rented under fake aliases.
Sources in Kolkata Police said the duo would be brought to the city on transmit remand and likely be produced at a local court tomorrow.
A Timeline of the Park Street Incident
- On Feb 5 2012, Suzette Jordan, a mother of two, was offered a lift home late at night by 5 men in Park Street, one of Kolkata’s urban nightlife hubs. Once in the car, the 5 men gang raped her, allegedly at gunpoint. Suzette was later thrown out of the car.
- Suzette filed an FIR against the 5 on February 9th, and the first set of medical tests were conducted on the victim only on February 14th, about ten days from the incident. The victim attributed her delay to lodge a complaint to trauma.
- West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee initially accused the victim of ‘cooking up’ the story in an attempt to defame and malign the government.
- The 5 accused were initially hard to identify, since they had used fake names with the victim during their previous interactions, which did not correspond to the Facebook accounts, the base searching point for cops.
- Three of the accused were nabbed by then Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Damayanti Sen on February 18th from Howrah, Kolkata. CCTV footage from the lobby of the pub where the victim and the 5 accused had been in before the incident were used to identify the accused.
- The three, identified as Ruman Khan, Naser Khan and Sumit Bajaj, were found guilty in December 2015, and were convicted under sections 376 (2)(g) (gangrape), 120B (criminal conspiracy) 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 506 (criminal intimidation) and 34 (common intention) of IPC. Two of the remaining accused, Mohammed Ali along with main accused, Kader Khan were absconding.
The Arrest of Kader Khan
- Acting on a tip off that Kader, absconding since the incident, sleuths of Kolkata Police recently started tracking his mobile calls, and soon located Khan, who had been on the run since Feb 2012, in a Ghaziabad apartment, hiding out with his cohort, Mohammed Ali.
- Soon after he was located somewhere near New Delhi, sleuths started zeroing on him. On Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar’s instruction, a special team was formed to nab Kader.
- It was learnt that Kader was hiding in Bangladesh and after running out of cash he returned to Delhi through Nepal. After keeping him under surveillance for almost a week, a joint team of Delhi Police and Kolkata Police team raided his hideout last night and arrested him, the IPS officer said.
went on to become a women’s rights campaigner in Kolkata. The single mother of two, led a movement against the persistent culture of victim-shaming in rape cases in India (she refused to be called a rape victim, asking the media to call her by her name instead), passed away in a Kolkata hospital after succumbing to Meningoencephalitis in March 2015, at the age of 40.