Indian police on Sunday detained four men and continued their manhunt for three others who allegedly attacked a Spanish tourist couple, beat them both, and gang-raped the woman.
The couple gave their names as “Vincente” and “Fernanda” in an interview with Spanish media on Saturday, the day after the attack. The pair has an Instagram account with about 200,000 followers where they post videos of their world travels.
According to the couple, they were on a motorcycle tour of Jharkhand in eastern India when they were attacked. They had just set up camp for the night, about a mile off the main road, when they were approached by a group of seven men who entered their tent and brutally assaulted them.
“They beat us. They put a knife to my neck, and told me they were going to kill me,” the man called Vincente said in a post to the couple’s Instagram account after the attack.
“Something has happened to us that we would not wish on anyone. Seven men have raped me. They have beaten us and robbed us, although not many things because what they wanted was to rape me. We are at the hospital with police. It happened tonight here in India,” said a tearful Fernanda.
“They raped me, they took turns while some watched and they stayed like that for about two hours,” she said in the Spanish interview.
Injuries were visible on the faces of both tourists in their video, and in their subsequent TV interview. The man said in a later Instagram post that his assailants struck him in the head with his motorcycle helmet.
“My mouth is destroyed, but my partner is worse than me. They have hit me with the helmet several times, with a stone on the head. Thank goodness she was wearing the jacket and that stops the blows a little,” he said.
Jharkhand police said they found the couple along the roadside at around 11:00 p.m. on Friday night with visible serious injuries. A medical examination confirmed the woman had been sexually assaulted. The police seemed to immediately have a good idea who the assailants were and the first suspect arrested provided information on the others.
The woman was later identified as a 28-year-old dual citizen of Brazil and Spain. Both the Brazilian and Spanish foreign ministries said on Sunday they had contacted Indian officials and reached out to the victims.
“We need to stand united in our commitment to end violence against women everywhere in the world,” the Spanish embassy declared on social media.
The Brazilian embassy issued a “strong repudiation of the barbaric crime against the couple” and gave assurances they would be “looked after by the Indian emergency services.”
The female victim said the couple took down their Instagram posts about the attack at the request of the Jharkhand police, who said the video might “disturb the investigation.”
“My face looks like this, but it’s not what hurts me the most. I thought we were going to die. Thank God we are alive,” she said.
The attack sparked outrage in Spain, Brazil, and India, where social media users called it “shocking” and a “nightmare.”
“Shameful! Indians are treating foreigners like they treat their own women. Shame on our rotten society,” declared Bollywood actor Richa Chadha.
Comedian Vir Das said the attack was “a shameful act that we MUST show will not be tolerated.”
India’s National Commission for Women criticized the police for responding slowly to the incident since they seemed to know the identity of the assailants early on. India’s WION News reported that demands for the local superintendent of police to be suspended.
“In this state, neither Adivasis nor Dalits are safe,” lawmaker Nishikant Dubey of the governing BJP party lamented. “Now this has become an international matter that a Spanish woman comes with her husband to India, and it comes to light that she has been gang-raped.”
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