The car in which the girl was travelling

Jan. 6: A 24-year-old student of a Noida B-school was waylaid by 10 young men returning from a cricket match who then took her to a desolate spot before taking turns to rape her, a police complaint filed by her friend said.

Five of the accused were arrested early this morning on the FIR filed by the friend who was with the girl when their car was intercepted shortly after they had left a mall around 5 yesterday evening.

The alleged assault came a day after three men snatched an 18-year-old Delhi University student from Noida’s streets and tried to rape her in a moving car.

Noida City police chief Ashok Tripati said the friend’s FIR this morning alleged that some motorcyclists intercepted their car, forced their way in and drove to an isolated spot.

“Amit Talwar, the friend, said they had travelled about 900 metres from the (Great India Palace) mall when some motorcyclists overtook them and waylaid them. They forcibly entered the car and one of them started driving,” Tripati said. The youths, he added, were carrying cricket bats and wickets.

After raping the management student, the accused, all in their early 20s, some of them undergraduate students, snatched the mobile phones of the victim and her friend, Tripati said.

Sanjay, one of the accused

The officer said initial medical examination of the girl, a resident of Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, had revealed no internal injuries.

“We are waiting for the final pathological report. We will not spare anyone in this case as this crime is unpardonable,” he said.

Police sources said the five arrested youths had been identified as Pushpendra Yadav, Srikant Yadav, Sanjay, Gautam and Sudhir, and a hunt was on to nab the five others. The 10, the sources said, were on their way back from a cricket match when they accosted the girl.

“Immediately after the incident was reported to the police station in Noida Sector 39, we formed six teams and went about searching for the culprits. Five were arrested,” Uttar Pradesh additional director-general of police Brij Lal said.

State police chief Vikram Singh confirmed the arrests. “We have arrested five persons…. We will ensure that all the culprits are booked,” Singh told reporters in Delhi on the sidelines of a chief ministers’ conference on internal security.

Asked how the police had zeroed in on the suspects, Tripati said based on the girl’s statement, they “investigated” which local teams were playing cricket yesterday. “We soon nabbed the boys as they were from Gali Chowkhandi village near the site of the crime.”

He said three motorcycles, cricket bats, wickets, helmets and three mobile phones had been seized from the accused, who had no past criminal record.

A senior police officer said the accused had confessed to raping the girl and an identification parade was likely tomorrow.

One of the accused, Sanjay, told reporters outside a court today that one of them saw the girl and her friend, both said to be students of a private management institute in Noida, “chatting inside the car”.

“We were ten of us. We were returning after playing cricket. One of us saw the girl and the boy inside the car and forced ourselves inside the car,” Sanjay said.

Sources said the girl was now in a hospital and her condition was stable.