Raipur: A fast track court in Chhattisgarh has acquitted two youth accused of raping 48-year-old nun at a Medicare centre in Raipur in August 2015-an incident that had sparked protests in the state capital.
Both the accused 19-year old Dinesh Dhurv and 25-year-old Jitendra Pathak were acquitted by the fast court judge Nidhi Sharma, due to ” lack of evidence”.
As incident came to light in August 2015, police and the administration initially sought to downplay without mentioning the rape survivor as a ‘Nun” and maintained that a “sister” had lodged a complaint that two people forced their entry into the Medicare centre and molested her.
Subsequently, amid mounting protests from opposition parties as well as all minority organisations, including various Christian bodies, police interrogated more than 200 people and narrowed down on these accused. Later, the police filed charge-sheet against them, The Times of India reported.
In her complaint to the police, the rape survivor said that she was sleeping at the nursing centre run by missionaries in Raipur when two masked men barged at around 1.30 am and tied her hands and feet before gang raping her.
When the nun failed to report for the duty next morning, her colleagues reached her room and found her gagged and tied to the bed. They called the police and she was taken to a hospital and her statement was recorded. The victim, a resident of Kerala, belongs to Salesian Missionaries of Mary Immaculate.
While state Congress and Chhattisgarh Christian Forum had termed the incident as a “systematic attack on minorities in the state”, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) had also reacted that such incidents posed serious questions on the safety and security of the minorities in India.