Brutal gang-rape of 15-year-old girl shocks India as body found with ruptured lungs and liver

A 15-year-old Dalit girl in India was gang-raped so badly that she died after her liver and lungs ruptured.

The teenager went missing on her walk home from school last Tuesday (9 January). Her badly mutilated body was found over the weekend in the deeply conservative state of Haryana.

The Dalit girl is believed to have been raped by at least four men. Police are questioning several suspects.

"We have detained a few people on the basis of doubt. We have not arrested them yet. We are interrogating them now," Abhishek Garg, superintendent of police in Haryana's Kurukshetra district, told Al Jazeera.

The victim's father accused police of negligence in tracking down the culprits.

"My daughter was kidnapped and raped. She was tortured. If the police had done their job on the day she went missing, my daughter would have been alive, nothing bad would have happened to her," he said.

Dr SK Dattarwal, a professor at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Rohtak where the post-mortem was carried out, said the girl was raped by more than two people.

"They might have tried to thrust some object in her vagina also. Her liver was ruptured. The injuries were all around the body, on the face, neck, lips and chest.

"It appears that the victim had struggled a lot to escape from the sexual assault," he said.

Women's rights activists say India is experiencing a rape epidemic, with incidents involving children increasing by over 82% in 2016, according to data published by the National Crime Records Bureau.

Just hours after police found the 15-year-old girl's body, a second teenage rape victim was found dead in a pond in the Panipat district. Two men, both neighbours of the 12-year-old girl, have been arrested, AFP reported.

Police chief Rahul Sharma said both men had confessed to luring the girl outside before raping and killing her.