A 28-year-old woman domestic help in an east Delhi neighbourhood has alleged that she was repeatedly raped by her employer and also gang-raped by nine other persons since last October, police said Friday.
On one occasion, she was allegedly raped by a “friend of a doctor” at the Lok Nayak Hospital after she was taken there for treatment of injuries caused by the first rape.
The woman had secured the job as a help at the property dealer’s home with the help of a woman neighbour, Geeta Sethi, after her husband was left unemployed due to the “sealing drive”. In her complaint, the woman has accused 42-year-old Sethi of facilitating the sexual assaults on her.
According to Meghna Yadav, deputy commissioner of police (Shahdara), the property dealer and the woman neighbour has been arrested after the help approached Geeta Colony police station last Sunday.
“We have registered a case of gang rape under the IPC and under sections of the Immoral Trafficking Act. We are trying to identify the other persons involved in the rapes,” the DCP said. In her statement to police, the victim has identified some of the suspects and provided some of their phone numbers.
The woman help had been subjected to repeated rapes since October 21, the DCP said.
“Sethi got her to work as a domestic help at the home of the property dealer, a widower. Soon after she started working, the property dealer raped her. He also recorded a video and used the footage to blackmail the help,” an investigator, who did not want to be identified, said.
Since the woman was injured in the sexual assault, Sethi allegedly took her to Lok Nayak Hospital where she was introduced to the friend of a doctor that Sethi knew. “The doctor’s friend took me inside and raped me,” the victim alleged in her complaint.
The DCP said the rape suspect in the hospital case is yet to be identified. “The rapist could have been another patient, a ward boy or someone else,” the DCP said, adding it was unclear if the crime happened inside or outside the hospital. Dr Kishore Singh, medical director of the Lok Nayak Hospital, said no such incident happened inside the hospital premises. “We have investigated and found no such case,” he said.
Over the next few months, the woman alleged that she was gang-raped multiple times by a total of nine persons.