Three young men allegedly kidnapped two teenaged girls from Greater Noida after promising them jobs, threw one of them off their car in Meerut before running her over, then gang-raped the other inside the car between Meerut and Bulandshahr.

The murdered girl’s family told reporters the 18-year-old had made a call to them from inside the abductors’ car but Greater Noida police refused to act when they contacted them.

The alleged crimes took place between 5pm on May 6 and 7am on May 7, within a 50km stretch that is about 100km east of Delhi and 480km northwest of Lucknow.

The atrocity flies in the face of chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s claim that his government had ensured safety for women, so much so that a crime committed at a crossroads would be countered at the next by shooting the perpetrators. But there was none to rescue the girls although the crime happened over 14 hours on one of the most sanitised roads in the National Capital Region and at a time when the carriageway was teeming with security personnel owing to the tensions with Pakistan and the resultant mock drill.

On Saturday evening, the police said they had arrested Sandeep Thakur and Amit Singh from Surajpur in Greater Noida and Gaurav Kumar from Loni in Ghaziabad, both arrests involving exchanges of fire that left Gaurav and Sandeep with leg injuries.

The 19-year-old survivor was quoted as telling reporters: “Amit Singh, who sat in the office of a consultancy firm, had promised us jobs there and asked us to come at 6pm on May 6.”

While the girls were waiting for a cab in their Surajpur neighbourhood in Greater Noida on May 6 evening, Amit arrived in a car and offered them a lift, she said. His friend Sandeep was with him. After the girls got in, Amit picked up another man, whom he and Sandeep addressed as “Gaurav”, the girl added.

“They turned the car towards Meerut and drove for a while along the Peripheral Expressway. They offered us a drink and attacked us when we refused. They forced us to drink it,” the survivor said.

“When my friend began shouting and beating on the window to draw attention, they left the expressway and thrashed her badly. They threw her off the moving car in the Jani area of Meerut. They then reversed the car and crushed her under its wheels,” she added.

“They gang-raped me before dropping me near a temple in the Khurja area of Bulandshahr the next morning. It was a 14-hour ordeal. I went directly to Khurja police station.”

A relative of the murdered girl said: “We received a call from our daughter on May 6 evening saying Sandeep and his friends had kidnapped her and a friend. We rushed to Surajpur police station but the policemen gave us an earful and asked us to get lost.”

He said the girl might have been alive had the police acted swiftly.

Amit is an LLB student while his cousin Gaurav works in a private firm. Sandeep is the son of a local scrap dealer. They all lead expensive lives, police sources said.