Rape Suspects Captured in Record Time, Delhi Police Say

Tsering Topgyal/Associated PressPolice officers locking the gate of a police station, during a protest on Tuesday, condemning the rape of a 23-year-old woman on Sunday.

Four men have been arrested in the rape of a woman and the beating of her male friend, after the police tracked down the bus in which the assaults took place, Delhi's police chief said Tuesday.

The particularly brutal nature of the crime has shaken up India. A young physiotherapy student was raped by several men and severely beaten in a moving bus on Sunday night. A male friend accompanying her, a network e ngineer with the outsourcing giant HCL, was also bludgeoned with iron rods.
Both were thrown out of the moving bus after the assailants took the victims' belongings and clothes, the police said, and the two were transported in a police van to the hospital in a semiconscious state.

The police chief, Neeraj Kumar, said at a news conference on Tuesday that the male victim recalled that the bus was white, and closed-circuit television footage from a hotel showed a white bus displaying the word “Yadav,” a common surname that refers to a certain caste.

The police, studying transport department records, found 370 white buses registered with the Delhi Transport Authority. Police teams started checking white buses in the city, locating one with “Yadav” on the side. That turned out to be the wrong bus, Mr. Kumar said, but the owner provided the location of a similar bus.

Police teams were sent to a slum area a few miles awa y from where the victims first boarded the bus. They found Ram Singh sitting in the driver's seat of the bus, Mr. Kumar said. He first denied any involvement in the crime but after a sustained interrogation he broke down and confessed, Mr. Kumar said.
According to a statement released by the Delhi police, Mr. Singh, who drove a chartered school bus during the week, and his helper, Akshay Thakur, had a small party on Sunday with Mr. Singh's younger brother, Mukesh, a driver and a cleaner.

The men decided to take a joy ride in the bus, and they were joined by another cleaner named Raju, Pawan Gupta, a fruit seller, and Vijay Sharma, who worked at a local gym. At a busy bus stand nearby in the Munirka neighborhood, they stopped and shouted for passengers. The two victims boarded the bus at 9:30 p.m., assuming it was one of the many private carriers that have contracts to ply Delhi's public bus system.

Soon after they boarded, the men on the bus started harassi ng the woman. When her friend objected, he was assaulted, injuring his head, arms and leg. The woman was dragged to the rear of the bus, where some of the men raped her.
The police are still looking for two suspects, Mr. Thakur and Raju, he said.

“We have solved the crime in record time,” Mr. Kumar said Tuesday. “We will pray to court for a fast-track trial. We will also pray for the most severe punishment of life imprisonment.”