Busted! Five Charged with Kidnapping and Raping Japan Student in India

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Five men have been arrested in India and charged with kidnapping and repeatedly raping a Japanese woman, the New York Times reports.

News reports differ on the specifics, but the general outline is consistent: one or two men who said they were tour guides approached the 23-year-old woman in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. The Guardian reports that she had been studying life in rural India.

"One of the men spoke very fluent Japanese," Pallav Kanti Ghosh, a Calcutta police commissioner, told the BBC. "They took her to Digha [a beach resort] on November 23. There they sexually assaulted her and robbed her of 76,000 rupees [$1201] using her ATM card."


The 23-year-old woman was ultimately taken to the Gaya district in the state of Bihar. "There, the men handed her over to other gang members," Ghosh said.

She was held at gunpoint in a secluded basement, The Guardian reports, for almost three weeks. "When her health condition deteriorated due to repeated rape and poor living conditions, she was brought to Gaya [town] for medical treatment on 20 December," a police officer involved in the investigation told Agence France-Presse.

At this point, the woman was able to contact a group of Japanese tourists who helped her reach the Japanese consulate in Kolkata.

Three of the men were arrested near Bodh Gaya and two in Kolkata, Ghosh told the BBC, further claiming that Indian police are searching for other members of what he called an organized gang officials believe target single women tourists.

Deputy superintendent Alok Kumar Singh told AFP that two tour guides, Sajid Khan and his brother Jawed—32 and 25, respectively—were arrested on Friday. "We have arrested the duo for confining and raping the Japanese student," he said.