Four persons have been taken into custody by Indian authorities on suspicion of being members of the group that attacked the girlfriend of a Spanish tourist and gang-raped her.
The woman is a travel blogger with over 200,000 Instagram followers; the authorities did not disclose her identity.
The attack occurred on Friday night while she and her companion were travelling in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand.
Before a group of seven men attacked the couple, they had parked their motorcycles and pitched a tent in the state’s Dumka district to spend the night.
According to Jharkhand police head Ajay Kumar Singh, all of the group’s members have been identified, and the other suspects will be taken into custody “soon.”
“They had beaten us and robbed us, although not many things [were taken] because what they wanted was to rape me,” the 28-year-old woman said in an Instagram post.
Her male partner claimed in another post that his “mouth is destroyed” after taking multiple helmet-related hits to the head.
After the attack, the two were saved by a patrol car late on Friday night, and they were taken to a nearby hospital.
The pair was on a tour of South Asia, having just returned from a trip to Sri Lanka before to their arrival in India.
In India, women are frequently the targets of sexual violence; women from tribal minority populations are especially vulnerable. The issue is exacerbated by the stigma associated with reporting crimes and the poor conviction rate of suspects.
An average of nearly 90 rapes were reported in India every day, meaning one woman was raped every 18 minutes, in 2022, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, which recorded 31,516 rape cases that year.
The states with the most cases were Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan.
