JAIPUR // Police were searching on Monday for a man who raped a Japanese student who was sightseeing in northern India, while officers elsewhere said they had arrested eight men suspected of brutally raping and killing a Nepalese woman.
The 20-year-old student attacked on Sunday is the second Japanese woman to be raped in India in recent months. The man had met her in Jaipur and offered to act as her tour guide, according to police inspector general D C Jain.
The man later took the woman on his motorcycle to a farming village outside the city in Rajasthan state, where he raped her on the side of the road before leaving her, D C Jain said. Villagers who heard the woman crying helped her to contact police. A medical examination confirmed the woman had been raped.
Police were searching for a man in his 20s and were certain “the person who committed the rape is from Jaipur,” D C Jain said, though police have yet to identify a particular suspect.
In December, a 22-year-old research scholar from Japan was held captive and gang raped for nearly three weeks in a village near a Buddhist pilgrimage centre in Bihar state. Police have arrested several suspects in that case, which also involved a tourist guide who had offered to help the woman with sightseeing.
In another case, police said on Monday they had arrested eight people suspected in the rape and murder of a Nepalese woman in the north-west Indian state of Haryana.
The 28-year-old woman had been staying with her sister when she went missing on February 1. Her mutilated body was discovered three days later, and an autopsy revealed that several organs were missing and that objects including stones, blades and a stick had been inserted into her body, police said.
* Associated Press
