Four years after the crime, the prime accused in the Park Street rape case was arrested by a special team of Kolkata Police from Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad yesterday, following months of surveillance.
Kader Khan was nabbed along with an accomplice, Ali Khan, from Greater Noida, the police said, and added that both were brought to Kolkata on transit remand. They were produced before a local court which sent them to 14 days police custody.
The two accused were produced at the Bankshal court in Kolkata yesterday, where they were sent to police custody till October 14.
“The case needs to be re-opened. The police was not able to interrogate the two accused as they were on the run. Therefore we have appealed for police custody for them so that their involvement in the rape incident can be investigated,” said the public prosecutor.
However, the counsel of the accused said they are not happy with the court’s order and said a case cannot be reopened after the final verdict is given.
An Anglo-Indian woman was sexually assaulted at gunpoint in a moving car on February 6, 2012, by a gang of five men.
Her misery was coupled by disparaging remarks made by several ruling Trinamool Congress leaders including Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who called the rape incident a “cooked up case” and Lok Sabha member Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar who tagged it as a “sex deal gone wrong”.
However, the woman, who came forward and revealed her identity on television in June 2013, fought her case for three years against heavy odds before she died in March last year of multiple organ failure after being diagnosed with encephalitis.
Nearly nine months after her death, the woman finally got justice with a court pronouncing all three accused guilty. The main accused Kader Khan and Ali went missing eluding police until now.