Police have arrested three men after a semi-naked body of a teenage girl was discovered near a railway track in eastern India Tuesday morning, BBC News reported. The victim was allegedly raped and murdered after she protested against village elders' harassment of her father, NDTV network quoted villagers as saying.
The father of the 16-year-old said she went missing Monday night after trying to save him from being attacked by village elders as punishment for failing to repay a loan, according to an officer.
After she begged the elders not to thrash her father, who had been brought before them over the loan to borrow a tractor, elders of the village council in West Bengal state started demanding for her to spit on the ground and lick it up - an act considered a grave form of humiliation, her family said.
The girl's body was found near a railway track in the state's Jalpaiguri district on Tuesday - a day after a village court had summoned her and her farmer father to settle a dispute over a tractor, BBC's Amitabha Bhattasali in Calcutta said.
In deeply impoverished Indian villages, village elders hold huge sway and often act as a parallel legal system, settling disputes, handing down judgments and sanctioning punishments of residents deemed to have violated local codes, Agence France-Presse reported.
"Police arrested three people after the girl's father lodged a complaint that she was raped and murdered," additional superintendent of police James Kujur told AFP.
"Her father named 13 persons in the complaint. We are investigating the case," said Kujur, who visited the crime scene in Jalpaiguri district.
"The girl went missing after she protested at the village council, who had called her father asking him to settle his dues for hiring a power tiller from a villager."
Scrutiny of sexual violence in India has grown following public outrage over the 2012 fatal gang-rape of a student on a moving bus in New Delhi. But attacks against women have continued unabated in many parts of the country.
Although three members of the village council have been arrested for questioning, none of them have been charged yet. Meanwhile, council elders denied any involvement in the girl's death, claiming they had not assaulted the father.
