In a ghastly incident, a teenage girl in the intensive care unit (ICU) was allegedly gang-raped by a hospital worker and four other persons in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly city. She was admitted in the ICU of a private hospital after she was bitten by a snake while working in the family farm.
According to the police complaint lodged by her father, the incident occurred on Wednesday night, a day after the 17-year-old was admitted in the ICU. The police have arrested a staff member of the hospital and are on the lookout for four others. The CCTV footage of the ICU has been seized by the police.
The superintendent of police, city, Abhinandan Singh said, “The girl was not in a condition to speak or call for help at the time of the incident. But she informed her relative about it when she was transferred to the general ward on Friday. As per the complaint, the accused raped the girl on her bed inside the ICU. The bed has long curtains around it that apparently blocked the view of other staff.”
“The compounder at the hospital, Sunil Sharma and three others have been charged with gang rape in the FIR. Two police teams have been deployed to arrest them,” Singh said.
The accused have also been charged under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act as the girl is a minor.
The victim had told her grandmother that a man in uniform and four others walked into the ICU when she was alone at night. They tried to forcefully give her an injection and when she fought them, the men gagged her and tied her hands and raped her, the teenager said. Her grandmother raised an alarm and complained to the doctors about the incident and the hospital authorities called the police.
In a similar incident, a ward boy and a medical student were arrested on October 16 for raping a minor nursing student while she was admitted to a Bagpat hospital in Uttar Pradesh.
Another incident that transpired in 2016, which sent the country into a shock wave was when a 22-year-old woman was allegedly drugged and raped by an on-duty doctor at a reputed hospital in Gandhinagar. The alleged incident took place in the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) where the patient was undergoing treatment for dengue.
