It’s no secret that police in general are partial to the odd cock-up now and again — we all are — and we’ve featured plenty of videos and stories over the years showing as much.
But to my memory this story from India this week has to be the most unforgiveable failures in police history.
The story goes that a 17 year old girl from the Aurangabad district arranged to meet someone she met on Facebook on July 7th, but when she showed up to the meeting place she was dragged into the forest and raped at knife point by two men. They stole her mobile phone and even filmed the assault and threatened to blackmail her with the footage.
Her family reported the incident to the police, who thought the best course of action would be to take the girl back to the same area the next day and leave her there as bait for the two men to strike again.
Image VIA
Somehow the police officers watching her managed to completely lose track of her, and she was dragged into the forest and raped again.
Vishwas Patil, Inspector General of Police, said:
The girl was put through the injustice again. It is wrong to use a victim, especially a minor victim, as bait.
No shit. One silver lining I suppose is that the rapists, Nitin Savle (19) and Sanjay Havare (21), were arrested at a nearby train station the same night, but the police are rightfully still getting a ton of grief over the whole thing.
The officer who was overseeing the operation, Vinod Ejjapwa, has been suspended pending an enquiry.
