Lucknow: Victim 'disrobes' herself to force police action after accusing IIT student of rape

Lucknow: For sixteen days, she was made to take rounds of police stations to get her complaint registered without success and was even declared mentally unfit by the cops after she alleged that she was raped by her senior in a car in Uttar Pradesh’s Agra town.

The police swung into action only after she partially stripped herself on a busy road to register her protest, and arrested the accused - an IIT student.

According to sources, the accused, identified as Shivansh Singh, a student of M.Tech at IIT-Jammu, was arrested on Tuesday. The victim and the accused were students at the same engineering college in Agra, where Shivansh was her senior. The victim is still a student at the engineering college.

The victim, a resident of Lucknow, alleged that Shivansh, who was her senior, had raped her in a car a few days back. She alleged that she was later dumped on the road by the accused.

The police, however, refused to register her complaint saying that the location of the accused was traced to Jammu on the day of the alleged rape. The victim continued to make rounds of the police station to get her complaint registered but to no avail.

Sources said that the police even sent her to a mental health centre stating that she appeared to be mentally unstable. She was, however, discharged from there in a day.

On Sunday, the police were informed that a girl had stripped herself on the road and that the passers by were making videos of her. A few women came to her help there.

An FIR was registered and the police called Shivansh, a resident of Ghazipur district of the state, for questioning and later arrested him after what they said was a result of a preliminary investigation that proved his involvement in the crime. "It was found that he had been harassing the victim for a long time," said a senior police official in Agra.

Sources said that the police had sought information from IIT-Jammu about his presence in the campus on the day of the incident and also sought record of his attendance and CCTV footage.