Three men raped a 30-year-old American woman in India Tuesday morning.
The woman, whose identity has been withheld, was in the northern Indian town of Manali in the early hours of the morning, when a truck driver offered her a ride from the village of Vashisht, where she was visiting a friend, to her lodgings in Manali, located around three miles away.
She accepted, stepping into the vehicle at around 1 a.m. The three men on board then raped her, including the driver, said Vinod Kumar Dhawan, Manali's disctrict police superintendent, who spoke with the Wall Street Journal.
A little over two hours later, the three men discarded the woman on the side of the highway. Some police officers spotted her walking to a bus stop and took her in.
"Highway patrolmen first noticed the woman along the stretch of the road," one officer told the Wall Street Journal. "She was screaming for help."
Police then escorted the scarred and shaken woman to the Manali precinct, where her rape case and abduction was logged at 4:30 a.m.
Dhawan said that no arrests have been made as of yet. After a medical examination, the rape was confirmed, but it was reported that no serious injuries were sustained.
This attack is the latest in a string of sex crimes against women that have occurred in India in the recent past, causing tourist rates to drop significantly since December 2012.
A 23-year-old university student was raped and murdered on a bus in the center of the capital, shocking the nation and causing hundreds of thousands of enraged Indians to take to the streets, calling for heightened safety and more stringent laws against sexual assault.
Shortly after that, a Swiss woman on a camping trip with her husband was gang raped in a remote forest. A young British woman reportedly jumped from her hotel window in Agra to sidestep a sexual attack just days later.
These assaults have largely been viewed as rare for the country-a docile one, generally speaking, that does not usually encounter such violent crimes.
But according to the National Crime Bureau, 24,206 rape cases were reported in India in 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported. Some activists say the actual number of sexual assaults is higher, as not all crimes are registered.
