Angry crowds demonstrate in India’s capital New Delhi after a five-year-old girl was allegedly raped, tortured and kept in captivity for 40 hours.
Police arrested a man they accuse of the attack from the eastern state of Bihar, and brought him back to New Delhi for interrogation. Doctors say the girl suffered severe injuries and bruising, including to her neck and genitalia.
Protests that began on Friday grew more intense after video footage showed a policeman slapping a woman protester.
Public fury over the latest attack in the capital echoed the response to the gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in December in New Delhi, which brought thousands of people onto the streets in protest and clashes with police.
The woman died of her injuries in a Singapore hospital.
The gang rape provoked national debate about violence against women, putting the issue onto the political agenda in the nation of 1.2 billion people a year before elections.
On Saturday, about 1,000 people gathered to demonstrate outside the police headquarters in New Delhi, where several people tried to break through metal barricades.
Smaller protests erupted outside the state-run hospital where the girl was being treated, the home of ruling Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi, and the residence of the country’s interior minister.
The girl was “conscious and alert” and her condition stable, but her injuries are infected and so severe she may need corrective surgery, an official of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences hospital told reporters.
Police identified the accused as a 22-year-old, who they said had fled the capital after leaving the girl for dead in an apartment of the same building where her family lives.