Lie tests for I rape suspects

Mateen Hafeez & V Narayan | TNN

Mumbai: The Bandra-Kurla Complex police, who are investigating the alleged rape of a 42-year-old woman by four businessmen in a parked car in the complex, will subject the four accused men to a polygraph test. This will be followed by the victim taking the same test at the forensic laboratory.

The woman, who is the mother of a 17-year-old boy, went to the Bandra-Kurla Complex police station on August 21 and stated that four persons—all of whom were known to her—had raped her on the back seat of a Tavera parked across from the Asian Heart Institute at the Bandra-Kurla Complex.

The woman said she was going to have dinner with the accused, but they stopped the car by the roadside and raped her one by one.

The investigators, however, appeared to have made up their mind right from day one that there were discrepancies in the victim’s allegations, because two of the four accused claimed that they were not even in the city at the time of the alleged rape.

If the police do put the woman through forensic tests, it would be the first time an alleged rape victim is subjected to such a procedure.

This is also among the rare cases in which the police have refused to reveal the identity or whereabouts of a rape victim to even the media.

A doctor who examined the victim said that there were no injury marks on her private parts. Experts, however, said that the absence of injuries on a rape victim may be inconclusive, given the possibility that she may have acted under coercion.

Police officials suggested the rape allegations could be a frame-up intended to malign the accused. They said the four accused had started constructing a residential complex in Bhuj in Gujarat, and wanted to erect statues of their parents there. But a Gujarat builder, identified as Gada, had filed a case against them which was later classified as “B summary’’, that is, it was false case filed with the intention to malign someone. “The four suspects say that Gada is now using the woman to wrongly frame them in a rape case,’’ said a senior police official.

The Times of India, August 28, 2009