Alwaght- A teenage girl has been raped and then set fire on in central India - the third such incident to shake the country in the same week.
The 16-year-old girl died after being soaked in kerosene and set alight at her home in Jujharpur village in Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh state.
The 26-year-old attacker, identified as Ravi Chadhar, burned his victim after she said she would tell her family about what had happened, Police said.
"We have arrested the two accused. One of them is the cousin of the girl who informed the main suspect that she was alone in the house," said Sagar district police superintendent Satyendra Kumar Shukla. "The main accused is married with a child.”
The girl's father said the family had gone to attend a wedding in a nearby village when the incident occurred.
Two other similar assaults took place in India's northeastern state of Jharkhand this week.
Another 16-year-old girl was burnt alive inside her home in Chatra district, allegedly by men who had gang raped her the night before. The victim's family said the four men, allegedly drunk, kidnapped her from her house, took her to a deserted spot and raped her.
Also, a 17-year-old girl, who is fighting for her life in hospital with severe burn injuries, was raped when she was alone at home and set on fire by a man from her village in Jharkhand's Pakur district.
The South Asian country is no stranger to such violent incidents. About 40,000 cases of rape were reported in India in 2016. However, many cases are believed to remain unreported.
One of the worst cases occurred in Kashmir in January 2018 when an eight-year-old Muslim girl gang raped and murdered at the hands of eight Hindu men, including two policemen.
Asifa Bano, from a nomadic Muslim community that roams the forests of Indian Kashmir, was drugged, held captive in a Hindu temple and sexually assaulted for a week before being strangled and battered to death with a stone.
Her case caused a wave of revulsion around the country but also exposed communal divisions after two former ministers of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party, pan-Hindu nationalistParty, joined a rally in support of the eight accused Hindus, saying they were innocent.
According to the charge sheet, the kidnapping, rape and killing of the girl was part of a plan to drive the nomads out of Kathua district in Jammu, the mostly Hindu region of India’s only Muslim majority state.
