GRAPHIC: Police & other men gang rape two sisters

Police officers, other men gang-raped, hanged teen sisters in India: cops

Four men, including two police officers, were arrested in India Thursday after police said they raped two teenage sisters and hanged them from a tree. Police are searching for three more suspects. The girls, 14 and 15 years old, disappeared from their home Wednesday.

LUCKNOW, India " A group of men, including at least two police officers, raped and killed two teenage sisters in rural India then hung their bodies from a mango tree, authorities said Thursday, announcing the arrests of four men.

Villagers found the girls' bodies hanging from the tree Wednesday morning, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state, police Superintendent Atul Saxena said. The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.

Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree for the rest of Wednesday, silently protesting alleged police inaction in the case. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls' bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down from the tree until the suspects were arrested.

Katra is about 180 miles southwest of the state capital, Lucknow.

Police arrested the four men later in the day and were searching for three more suspects.

AP Villagers sit in silent protest under the bodies of two teenage sisters hanging from a tree in India. Authorities in northern India have arrested four men, including two police officers, suspected of gang-raping and hanging the teenagers.

Autopsies confirmed the girls had been gang-raped and strangled before being hanged, Saxena said.

The villagers accused the chief of the local police station of ignoring a complaint by the girls' father Tuesday night that the girls were missing. The station chief has since been suspended.

The family belongs to the Dalit community, also called "untouchables" and considered the lowest rung in India's age-old caste system.

India tightened its anti-rape laws last year, making gang rape punishable by the death penalty, even in cases where the victim survives. The new laws came after the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in New Delhi that triggered nationwide protests.

NNIS via AP Video/AP Villagers gather around the bodies of two teenage sisters who were raped and hanged in the Katra village of Uttar Pradesh state, India.

Records show a rape is committed every 22 minutes in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people. Activists say that number is low because of an entrenched culture of tolerance for sexual violence, which leads many cases to go unreported. Women are often pressed by family or police to stay quiet about sexual assault, experts say, and those who do report cases are often subjected to public ridicule or social stigma.

Last month, the head of Uttar Pradesh state's governing party, the regionally prominent Samajwadi Party, told an election rally that the party was opposed to the law calling for gang rapists to be executed.

"Boys will be boys," Mulayam Singh Yadav said. "They make mistakes."

Originally posted by: blue-ice

I want to see those rapists hanging off the same tree...the girls uff😭...14 and 15...they were just kids😒

Originally posted by: KARAN888

It was on the Dutch national TV tonight,i couldn't even watch it.savagery at it is worst 🤢

oh god...this is so cruel

Originally posted by: blue-ice

Imagine the police doing that...who should people look for protection...its getting worse by the day in India...these rapists need to be hanged...🤢