Two teenage sisters were found hanging from a mango tree in India after being gang raped and strangled by at least five men, two of which are allegedly local police officers.
Hundreds of villagers formed a silent protest Wednesday around the girls’ swaying bodies still hanging from the tree in an effort to demand action from the police, who have not arrested three other suspects in the case.
The girls, who were 14 and 15, were searching for a toilet to use and disappeared into the fields near their home in Katra village. No one saw them again until their bodies were found hanging Wednesday morning, according to police Superintendent Atul Saxena.
Autopsies confirmed the girls were raped and strangled before being hanged, Saxena said.
Their father reported his daughters missing Tuesday night to the police chief, who villagers say ignored the complaint. He has since been suspended. The family is part of the country’s lowest rung – known as the “untouchables” – in the caste system.
India recently changed its anti-rape laws after the gruesome and fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a New Delhi bus last year. The law now makes gang rape punishable by the death penalty.
But not everyone in India agrees with the stricter law, including many in power. Mulayam Singh Yadav, the head of Uttar Pradesh state’s governing party, told his supporters at a April election rally that he didn’t support the death penalty for rapists.
“Boys will be boys,” he said. “They make mistakes.”
Records show a rape is committed every 22 minutes in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people, according to the Associated Press. Activists say that number is low because of an entrenched culture of tolerance for sexual violence, which leads many cases to go unreported. Women are often pressed by family or police to stay quiet about sexual assault, experts say, and those who do report cases are often subjected to public ridicule or social stigma.