A 17-year-old accused of playing a key role in the murder, rape and robbery of a 23-year-old medical student on a moving bus in Delhi last December is scheduled to appear before a special juvenile court in the Indian capital on Thursday.
The trial of five adult men accused of involvement in the protracted assault, which took place on busy public roads on a weekend evening after the victim and a male friend boarded an illegal bus while returning from the cinema, has opened at a newly established "fast track court" set up specifically to deal with the case to deliver speedy justice earlier this month. They face the death sentence.
The sixth accused, as a minor, is being tried in a separate process in a juvenile court. Legal experts say he faces a maximum of three years in jail if convicted.
The victim died in a Singapore clinic of massive internal injuries sustained during the attack.
Police officials this week told the Guardian that their case against the teenager, who comes from a remote village in the poor and violent northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, will be based on a statement given to investigators shortly after his arrest two days after the crime, the witness statements of the victim's friend, and DNA evidence that they say links him to the attack.
Lawyers for the accused have described the alleged confession as worthless, alleging it was made under duress following torture by police officers.
Only statements before a magistrate, not simply to police, are admissible as evidence, they say.
The statement gives harrowing and graphic details of the crime. Viewed by the Guardian, it also describes how the semi-literate teenager left a home broken by poverty and mental illness to come to Delhi six years ago, working first in scruffy roadside food stalls serving cheap meat dishes in a poor part of the Indian capital's eastern urban sprawl.
A stall owner who had employed the teenager said he had been a "good worker" whose wages had gone from 1,500 rupees (18) to 3,000 rupees (37) per month.
The teenager, who has not been publicly named, met Ram Singh, the oldest of the five men accused of the attack, 18 months ago and worked as a helper for a short period on the bus Singh drove.
More recently he had been working on other unlicensed buses but had come to the slum neighbourhood where Singh lived in south Delhi on the weekend of the rape to see his friend about some money.
On the evening of the attack, Singh was joined by his younger brother and a 24-year-old who had replaced the teenager as an assistant on his bus. Singh proposed taking the vehicle to "go out and have some fun", according to the document. Police officials claim that the trio regularly went on "joy rides" during which the proceeds of robberies would be used to pay sex workers.
On the night of the attack, the three men and the teenager were joined by two other local men, a fruitseller and a part-time gym assistant. Singh's brother drove the bus, another man acted as a conductor calling out for prospective fares and the others pretended to be passengers, the statement says. One man who got on the bus was beaten and robbed. Then at around 9pm the victim and her 28-year-old male friend, who was seeing her home after an evening watching a film at an upscale mall in south Delhi, got on board.
"A boy and a girl climbed into the bus. They both sat down and the boy asked ' 'in how much time will we get there?'," the teenager told the police, according to the statement. The pair handed over 10 rupees (12p) each for the journey but moments after the doors of the bus were shut, a scuffle broke out when one of the men asked the victim's friend what he was doing "roaming around" with a woman.
"[Ram Singh] gave the boy a slap and the boy pushed him away. Then all of them got together and started hitting the boy with punches and kicks. [The boy] was uncontrollable. [One man] took out an iron rod and hit the boy's head and started hitting left and right on all the other parts of his body. Then [three men] got hold of the girl and took her to the back of the bus. They beat her and put her on the seat with one hand pressed on her mouth and tore her clothes off," the statement says.
The teenager went on to describe the victim's resistance to the extremely violent assault, her serious internal injuries and loss of consciousness. Convinced by massive bleeding that the woman was dead, the men decided to throw her and her friend out of the moving bus on the roadside near Delhi's international airport, said the statement, which ended with the words: "I committed a mistake and please pardon me."
A second document, the statement of the victim's male friend, corroborates many of the details in the teenager's account, though diverges in others.
All of the accused in the case have pleaded not guilty.
MK Sharma, one of their legal team, said that the prosecution needed to establish that the accused had been correctly identified before "questions of evidence are even considered".
Sharma said his client, the younger Singh brother, had been wrongly indentified but did not have an "alibi" because he was not "wealthy", a reference to the practice of paying people to support claims that defendants had been wrongly accused in criminal cases.
In response to public outrage, the Indian government has tightened laws against sexual violence and has promised further legislation.
A new law on sexual harassment in the workplace was passed by the Indian parliament earlier this week.
Scores of witnesses are to be heard in the trial, which may take up to three months to complete, lawyers have said.
The trial of the teenager is expected to be completed more rapidly, officials say.
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