A woman from Uttar Pradesh in northern India has been a victim of a gang rape and several acid attacks in the past nine years.
The 35-year-old mother is currently under police protection after yet another recent acid attack on her last Sunday, July 2, 2017.
Apparently, she was in a women’s hostel when a man scaled the walls and poured the chemical on to her, said local police chief Vivek Tripathi. In media reports, the police chief said, “She was filling water at the hand pump when the attack took place. The attacker [immediately] fled.”
But this was not the first time. The woman had previously experienced four acid attacks, which first happened in 2008. During the first incident, she reported that she was also gang-raped which rubs salt in the wound. For legal reasons, the police authorities withheld her name.
Then, in 2012 and 2013, she was attacked again by the same men twice. The motives of these attacks, she suspected, boil down to a property dispute against her attackers, forcing her to withdraw the criminal case against them because of fears.
The two men faced trial for the attacks but bailed from prison in April.
This, however, was not the last straw. More recently, she was forced to drink a corrosive liquid while on a train with her daughter in March 2017, and despite police protection. The woman has sustained burn injuries to her face and shoulder and is currently being treated in a hospital.
The assailant is still at large and a manhunt operation has been launched to track him down.
Experts in India said her case was just the tip of the iceberg. More than 300 acid attacks were reported in the country in 2015, official figures showed.
Courts in India have banned the sale of acid to the public in that year to rein attacks. However, assaults have largely continued unabated.
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