In a horrifying incident, a widow was allegedly raped and gang-raped by seven persons for over eight years, police said here. The Beed police have launched an investigation against seven accused persons after naming them repeatedly involved in unnatural acts either singly or in a group at various places in the district for more than eight years. An investigating officer said arrests are expected soon. According to the police, it was in 2014, when a 24-year-old widow left for her home in an autorickshaw late in the evening, but the driver later called to inform that she had forgotten her purse in his three-wheeler.
He called her to his house, forced and raped her and also made a video clip of the act. But she remained silent in view of the social stigma of being a widow. Later, threatening to expose her MMS on social media, the auto-rickshaw driver – identified as Sandeep Pingale – repeatedly called her at various places and sought her pleas and protests to stop her exploitation. Ignoring her, he raped her. Pingale allegedly gave the video clip to his relatives, Gorakh Ingole and his brother Balaji Ingole, in 2015 and the two started repeatedly threatening, blackmailing and raping the widow.
The IO said that around 2020, Gorakh Ingole took her on his bike to a secluded place in the hills of Hivra, where four of his other friends took turns gang-raping her for over six hours, which included unnatural sex. Indulging in acts also included. After that fight, a lot of blood was flowing from the genitals of the woman, but they ignored her screams and continued their act. At one point in 2021, the widow had become pregnant and when she told her perpetrators, Gorakh Ingole forcibly took her to a clinic for an abortion. Tired of the ongoing regular torture, the widow left Beed city and started working as a restaurant manager in Majalgaon, but the torturers followed her there too and continued their diabolical behaviour.
Finally, she mustered up the courage and lodged a complaint with the Majalgaon police on Thursday about her shocking ordeal, the mental, physical and sexual assaults, injuries and pain she suffered silently for so many years. “Since it is a very serious offence, we immediately registered a zero FIR and handed it over to the Beed city police for further investigation,” an officer at Majalgaon police station told IANS. The accused have been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code for rape, conspiracy, gang rape, kidnapping, blackmail and other offences, he said.