Court allows identification parade into Iritty rape case

Sunday, January 01, 2012: The Thalassery chief judicial magistrate gave its permission to conduct an identification parade in connection with the gang rape of a teenage girl from West Bengal last week.
According to the Iritty police, the court has asked the Koothuparambu judicial first class magistrate court (JFCM) to oversee the identification parade because the magistrate there is a woman and this would help the victim open up easily and identify the accused.
The hospital authorities said the condition of the teen-aged girl from West Bengal, who was brutally raped and tormented by a group of people at Vayathur near Ulikkal, is improving slightly.
The doctors said the girl, who lost her mental balance, required counselling and other treatment to bring her back to the normal state.
Meanwhile the Thalassery chief judicial magistrate today directed the probe team to conduct an identification parade of the accused involved in the case. The date of the identification parade would be declared by the Court tomorrow.
The girl who was abandoned by her tormentors at Peruparamba near Iritty was admitted to the District Hospital here. According to the local people and the police, it was a four-member gang, who gave her a lift in a lorry, which raped her on a river-bank.
Going by the information available from the local people and the police, it was on December 16 that the girl from Murshidabad in West Bengal reached Iritty in search of her lover. When she came to know that the youth was working at Virajpet on the border of Karnataka state, she went to meet him along with her sister’s husband and another native of Bengal. The youth could not be spotted in Virajpeta as he had already returned to Bengal.
The girl along with her relative and the native of Bengal were on their way back to Iritty when those in a lorry offered them lifts. Instead of taking them to Iritty, as asked by the girl, the crew of the lorry took them to a river-bank at Vayathur and raped her after tying the two others with her to the lorry. The gang who raped the girl also invited another youth to join their nefarious deed.
The girl who was found in a state of exhaustion was taken first to the Taluk Hospital at Iritty and later to the District Hospital. According to the police sources, an investigation is already on to trace the culprits.