© Saurabh Das/Associated PressManohar Lal Sharma, lawyer for one of the accused, speaks to journalists outside the Saket district court complex where the accused in a gang rape are to be tried, in New Delhi on Thursday.
Police badly beat the five suspects arrested in the brutal gang rape and killing of a young woman on a New Delhi bus, the lawyer for one of the men said today, accusing authorities of tampering with evidence in the case that has transfixed India.
"They are innocent," Manohar Lal Sharma said of the five suspects ahead of a court hearing, which ended quickly after it turned out some of the official court paperwork listing the charges was illegible. He said police have beaten the men and placed other prisoners into the suspects' cells to threaten them with knives, adding, "You can't believe the reality of Indian prisons."
Five men have been charged with attacking the 23-year-old woman and a male friend on a bus as it was driven through the streets of India's capital. The woman was raped and assaulted with a metal bar on Dec. 16 and eventually died of her injuries. Rape victims are not identified in India, even if they die, and rape trials are closed to the media.
Sharma, who has made a series of inflammatory and often-contradictory statements over the past two days, at one point Thursday said the dead woman's male companion, who boarded the bus with her after the pair saw a movie together, was "responsible for the whole thing." He gave no details, though, and a few hours later said the man's responsibility "was only my opinion."
The case has sparked protests across India by women and men who say India's legal system doesn't do enough to prevent attacks on women. Women have told stories of relentless abuse - from catcalls to bus gropings to rapes - and of a police and judicial system that does little to stop it, often blaming victims' unchaste behaviour.
Comment: This is just more evidence that people are being forced to conform to specific profiles or else be branded mentally disabled, or to go just a little further, a terrorist. Don't stray too far outside the box or else you'll be labelled mentally sick. The fact is that people have been running away from organized religions for decades and forming their own individual opinions on spirituality, and who can blame them with the evidence of pedophilia and corruption within organized religion. Evidently the powers that be are afraid of people abandoning this form of control. So now we have this "official study" by "experts" who claim that such thinking is evidence of mental disorder. Thought control in action.