India Protests in India after woman gang raped and burned to death

Students and social workers in Amritsar hold placards during a protest seeking for justice for the rape case of a 27-year-old from Hyderabad

The gang rape of a veterinary doctor whose body was set on fire and dumped under a bridge has sent shockwaves through India, with hundreds of women taking to the streets in protest.

The charred body of the 26-year-old woman was found on the outskirts of the southern city of Hyderabad on Wednesday night.

CCTV footage, police reports and witness accounts suggest the attack had been premeditated. The woman’s scooter tyres had allegedly been deflated by four men, who then sat waiting in a lorry nearby and approached her to offer help.

She was allegedly dragged to an uninhabited scrubland near the motorway that was hidden from the road by bushes, where she was smothered to muffle her screams and raped by the men. It is believed they then suffocated her. Her body was then put into a truck and taken to a motorway underpass, where the men set it alight and dumped it at around 2am.Her body was found at 5am by a resident of nearby Chatanpally village who noticed smoke. The body was wrapped in a blanket and had been doused with kerosene.

The case has prompted revulsion across India, with many comparing it to the brutal gang rape and murder of a student on a bus in Delhi in 2012, which prompted thousands of women to take to the streets and resulted in a change in the law around what constitutes sexual crimes.

On Saturday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside a police station on the outskirts of Hyderabad to demand justice, while protests also took place in Delhi and Bangalore.

Three policemen have also been suspended for failing to act quickly when the woman’s disappearance was registered by her family on Wednesday, with the officers instead suggesting she had just gone off with a man and turning the family away from the police station. Before she was attacked, the woman had called her family at about 9pm to say her scooter was immobile and she was stranded by the road and scared.

.“The girl’s family are in shock,” said Kunder. “When they went to the police station to lodge a missing person report, the police only bothered to tell them it was not in their jurisdiction. If the police had responded immediately maybe the girl could have been saved. Now we are demanding immediate punishment for the perpetrators so that it sends a strong message to society.”

India is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman because of the high risk of sexual violence, according to a 2018 survey by the Thomson Reuters foundation. According to government figures, more than 32,000 rape cases were reported in 2017, but the real figure is believed to be far higher