Hathras gangrape case: Woman cremated by police at night; family says they were not allowed to take body home

Representative image by Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP

The body of the 19-year-old Dalit woman, who was raped and tortured by four men two weeks ago, was cremated before dawn on September 30 in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district, news reports suggest.

Her body reached her village in Hathras in an ambulance around midnight.

“It appears that my sister has been cremated; the police are not telling us anything. We begged them to let us bring her body inside the house one last time, but they didn’t listen to us,” the woman’s brother told The Indian Express at 3.30 am.

At 1.00 am, one of the victim’s brothers, told the newspaper that the “ambulance is on the main road; police are not letting us take the body inside the house.”

“They have switched on the lights of the cremation ground and are forcing us to perform her last rites right now. We don’t want to cremate her in the middle of the night; we want to take her home,” he said. He had also said that his father and brother were yet to reach home from Delhi.

The woman died at the Safdarjung hospital in Delhi on September 29. She had been shifted to in Delhi from Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh on September 28 after her condition showed no signs of improvement. The four accused have already been arrested.

The woman’s death led to sharp reactions from various sections of the society, including the opposition.

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