NEW DELHI // No one helped. She was naked, beaten, bleeding and dumped on the side of the road. Her male friend, also stripped, his leg and knee broken by an iron rod, raised his hand and asked for help.
But autorickshaws whizzed by and people in cars and on bicycles slowed, gawked and kept going.
In his first public account of the attack on a bus in Delhi, the male companion of the 23-year-old student who died from the injuries she sustained during a gang rape, criticised the police for their ineptitude.
"I carried her into the police van because maybe they didn't want to get their hands dirty, maybe because she was bleeding so much," the 28-year-old engineering student told the Indian television station Zee on Friday.
He said the police debated over who had jurisdiction for half an hour and no ambulance came to attend to him and his female friend.
Police took sheets from a nearby hotel to cover the naked woman and the man, who after watching the movie Life of Pi, had mistakenly boarded a private bus on December 16 where they were beaten, tortured, robbed and the woman was sexually assaulted by five men and a minor before they were dumped naked on a roadside.
The female student died on December 29 in a Singapore hospital, igniting debate and outrage about the treatment of women in India and beyond. He recounted their ordeal while he sat in a wheelchair.
"I gave a tough fight to three of them. I punched them hard. But then two others hit me with an iron rod," he said. The woman tried to call the police using her mobile phone but the men took it away from her, he said. They then took her to the rear seats of the bus and one-by-one began raping her, beating and violating her with an iron rod.
Afterwards he overheard some of the attackers saying the woman was dead before dumping both onto the street, he said.
The gang-rape victim's brother blamed a delay in medical treatment of nearly two hours for her death. "She told me that after the incident she had asked passers-by for help but to no avail and it was only after the motorway patrol alerted the police that she was rushed to hospital, but it had taken almost two hours," he said. "By then a lot of blood was lost."
Vivek Gogia, a police officer, yesterday denied the companion's assertion that police officers took 30 minutes before taking the rape victim and her friend to a hospital.
"Police vans left the spot for hospital with the victims within 12 minutes," he said.
The attack has outraged Indians and "doesn't do anything to enhance the already battered image of India and how it treats its women", said Rupa Subramanya, co-author of Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India.
"When you live in India, you know police will bungle things up. You cannot rely on them much. This only reconfirms what we already know [about police inefficiency]," Ms Subramanya said.
The attack and the female victim's death have sparked protests that briefly turned violent amid calls for greater protection of women and strengthening laws of violence against women.
The trial for the five accused in the case begins tomorrow. More than 10 charges, ranging from kidnapping and rape to murder, have been laid against them. The sixth, a minor, who has not been identified, will be tried in juvenile court.
Prosecutor Rajiv Mohan said the summary received from Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore said the rape victim's death from internal injuries was caused by septicaemia and multiple-organ failure, the Press Trust of India news agency said.
[ sbhattacharya@thenational.ae ]
* With additional reporting from the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
