Face crushed with car after rape and murder

TT, Chandigarh, May 13: A 23-year-old woman was abducted from Sonepat in Haryana on Tuesday, gang-raped and killed in a car during a 50km drive to Rohtak, and dumped on a vacant plot with a disfigured face and mutilated body.

According to a forensic report, the rapists ran the car over the woman's face to delay her identification. Police said she was already dead by then but could not immediately say how she was murdered.

By the time a passer-by found the body in Rohtak's industrial model township on Thursday, it had been partially eaten by stray animals.

Rohtak police today arrested two men: Sumit Kumar of Sonepat, said to be a spurned suitor of the woman, and his Uttar Pradesh-based friend Vikas.

"The prime accused (Sumit) claimed that he was once close to the victim and confessed to having killed her in a fit of rage following an argument," said Ajay Kumar, station house officer, Sonepat City police station.

"The injury marks on her body and private parts suggest she was mutilated with sharp weapons," a police source said.

Officers suspect the involvement of more men in the crime, which came days after the Supreme Court upheld the four death sentences in the similarly brutal Delhi bus gang-rape-and-murder case of December 2012.

"We had a photograph of the missing Sonepat girl but the body found in Rohtak was disfigured beyond recognition," an officer said.

Eventually, the abduction complaint that her parents had lodged with the Sonepat police helped their Rohtak counterparts connect the dots.

"The parents told us that the prime accused had been stalking their daughter for a long time and wanted to marry her. She spurned his advances every time," a senior officer said.

"A couple of weeks ago, the prime accused again asked her to marry him but she turned him down," an officer said.

"A few days later, he and his friends visited her home and threatened her. The victim apparently slapped him."

Police sources said that five to seven men abducted the woman on Tuesday evening from a spot in front of her office in Sonepat.

The Congress's Twitter handle said that Sonia Gandhi had expressed deep shock and outrage at the brutal gang rape, murder and mutilation of the woman.