India: Girl, 15, calls for attackers who kidnapped, raped, and shot her before throwing her down a well to hang

A 15-year-old girl in India who survived being kidnapped, raped over the course of a fortnight, shot twice in the chest from close range, and thrown down a 30ft well has called for her attackers "to be hanged".

The teenager known only as Poonam was found by villagers shivering and wet at the bottom of the well where she had been left for dead after her terrifying ordeal.

In describing her ordeal, she said she was bundled into a car by someone she knew and two other men in West Delhi. She was then taken to a remote farmhouse near Salempur Gurjar village, where she was kept for a fortnight and repeatedly raped by the gang.

Then on Saturday 6 December, the rapists told her she was going to be let free and they put her into a car. Poonam tried to escape as the three men stopped to drink some water. But as she ran away she was blasted twice with a .12-bore pistol from close range, luckily missing all of her vital organs.

Thinking that they had killed her, the trio panicked and threw her down a 30ft well in Tughalpur Village. But she survived the freezing overnight temperatures and was discovered the next day.

Speaking of her ordeal, Al-Arabiya reported her saying: "After a fortnight of repeated abuse, one night they said they will let me go. They put me in the car and drove to a store to buy alcohol and then parked the car near a well.

"They told me they will let me go but as I took a few steps back, they fired two shots. The first bullet hit my bone. I didn't feel a thing, my body just went numb. But after the second one I fainted.

"When I regained consciousness. I could see a bullet in my chest, so I just yanked it out. I want the rapists to be hanged. No one should go through what I did."

She was left in a critical condition but she was able to tell police what had happened, and crucially, the identities of her attackers, who were rounded up and arrested.

India was forced to confront problems of sexual harassment and violence after the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old medical student on a bus in December 2012. In the weeks that followed thousands of woman took to the streets to try to secure more rights and protection for women.