Indian authorities have arrested one man and are looking for four other suspects in the gruesome killing of two teenage girls who were gang-raped and then hanged from a mango tree in a village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police said on Thursday, according to Reuters.
The scene of the hanging became the scene of a silent protest by villagers angry about alleged police inaction in the case, Reuters reported. Two of the four men arrested so far are police officers.
Police arrested two police officers and two men from the village later Wednesday and were searching for three more suspects, according to Reuters.
Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree throughout Wednesday, silently protesting the police response, according to Reuters.
Villagers found the girls' bodies hanging from the tree early Wednesday, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state, police Superintendent Atul Saxena said, according to Reuters. The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.
More than a half billion Indians lack access to toilets, Reuters reported. A recent study said around 30 percent of women from poor families faced violent sexual assaults every year because they did not have access to a safe toilet.
Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls' bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down until the suspects were arrested, Reuters reported.
Autopsies confirmed the girls had been raped and strangled before being hung, Saxena said, according to Reuters.
The villagers accused the chief of the local police station of ignoring a report by the girls' father Tuesday night that the girls were missing, Reuters reported. The station chief in Katra, 180 miles southwest of the state capital, Lucknow, 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, according to Reuters.
Records show a rape is committed every 22 minutes in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people and activists say that number is low because of an entrenched culture of tolerance for sexual violence, which leads many cases to go unreported, Reuters reported.
Women are often pressed by family or police to stay quiet about sexual assault, and those who do report it are often subjected to public ridicule or social stigma, according to Reuters. India tightened its anti-rape laws last year, making gang rape punishable by the death penalty, even when the victim survives.
