The chilling sight of two teenage girls hanging from a mango tree in an orchard greeted the tiny village of Karta in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday morning. They had also been gang raped.
Police have arrested four men, including at least two police officers, in connection to the murders, BBC News reported. The policemen were removed from duty for not registering cases when the girls were reported to have gone missing.
The two cousin sisters, aged 14 and 15, had gone missing the previous night after they went into the fields near to their home to answer nature's call, said Atul Saxena, police superintendent for the area.
As the girls' bodies swung in the wind, villagers sat on the ground and prevented authorities from taking them down from the tree until the suspects were arrested, Indian TV footage showed.
The attackers were initially shielded by the local police, the victim's families said.
Autopsies confirmed the girls had been gang-raped and strangled before being hanged, Saxena said.
He said that an investigation was still taking place into the specific circumstances of the case and that police are seeking others who may have been involved.
"Their families allege that they were first brutally gang-raped by five men of the village and then hanged," NDTV reported. "It was after shocked and angry villagers blocked roads against the alleged police apathy, that a case of rape and murder was registered against the five young men, four of whom are absconding. One man has been arrested."
Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav told reporters today that "whoever is found guilty will be punished."
From 2001 to 2011, 48,338 child rape cases were recorded in India, the Asian Center for Human Rights' report last year revealed. The annual number of reported cases rose 336 percent over that period.
More broadly, records show a rape is committed every 22 minutes in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people, USA Today reported.
