Tag Archive for 'rape'

The Shopian botch-up

Published on October 4, 2009 in India and human rights. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

On May 29, 2009, two women disappeared in Shopian district of Kashmir. A day later their bodies were found. They were allegedly raped, and murdered. Muzamil Jameel looks at the shocking case in The Sunday Express:

On the evening of May 29, Neelofar, 22, and her sister-in-law Aasiya, 17, left for their apple orchard across the Rambiyar stream at Nagabal Dehgam, which their family had bought recently. Hoping to return before sundown, Neelofar didn’t take her two-year-old son Suzaine with her. But she never returned.

Neelofar’s husband Shakeel Ahangar launched a desperate search for his wife and sister but drew blank. The wife of one of the neighbours, Ghulam Qadir, had seen the girls leave the orchard but couldn’t say where they went. As the shadows grew darker, Shakeel decided to go to the local police station. A police party accompanied him and started a search across the Rambiyar stream. They looked till 2.30 in the morning before calling off the search till morning.

The following day, when the police along with Shakeel returned to the Rambiyar stream, they found Neelofar’s body. Aasiya’s body was recovered a km downstream. According to the Justice Jan Commission report-the commission was set up by the government to probe the case and was led by a retired High Court judge-the police flouted the procedure they were required to follow, right from the time the bodies were found to when they were identified.

The local police’s initial report suggested that the two women had died by drowning. They didn’t bother to collect the evidence-both circumstantial and forensic-at the spots where the bodies were found. The spots were not scanned for evidence, the clothes of the victims were not secured and, in fact, it was villagers and not the police who brought Aasiya’s body to her home in Bonpore in Shopian. More:

Fashion designer Anand Jon gets 59 years for sex crimes

Published on September 1, 2009 in Crime and Fashion. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

From Los Angeles Times:

anand_jonCelebrity fashion designer Anand Jon Alexander was sentenced to 59 years to life in prison Monday afternoon for sexually assaulting seven young women and girls he enticed with the promise of modeling jobs.

Alexander, acting as his own attorney, presented a lengthy argument asking for a new trial because of juror and prosecutorial misconduct. He also alleged inadequate defense by his former attorneys. Judge David Wesley denied the request.

Alexander stared ahead blankly as Wesley handed down the sentence. His victims, who were seated in the jury box during sentencing, wept.

Alexander, who was a guest designer on the reality television show “America’s Next Top Model,” was convicted last November of 16 charges of rape, sexual assault and other crimes. Wesley handed down the maximum sentence to Alexander for all but two of those counts, saying he showed no remorse for his actions and posed a danger to other young women. More:

[Image: Anand Jon website]

And below, a 2007 story from the New York Times:

The designer who liked models

So who is Anand Jon? A rapist? Or a mark? To some he is a garden variety arriviste, an overeager cad, who crossed the line into criminal territory when his sense of entitlement overwhelmed his good sense. To others he is a struggling design talent, who played by the same elastic set of rules that govern everything else in the celebrity world and fashion industry – except he was caught.

“We all know that when success comes very young at a very high level, people somehow lose a part of their compass,” said Catherine Saxton, a longtime fashion publicist in New York, whose clients have included Dennis Basso, but not Mr. Jon. “He was flying in a very high crowd and flying in that crowd for quite some time.” On the other hand, “there are a lot of young girls who want to be in fashion, who want to be in shows, who want to be photographed – who want it,” she continued. “It’s very easy to be subverted.”

She added: “He had the sizzle. If you were a wannabe, he was a great coattail to ride on.”

IT was a single sexual encounter, around midnight on March 4, that led to the series of accusations against Mr. Jon. According to the police report and to lawyers involved in the case, the designer had been corresponding on the Internet for months with a petite blond 19-year-old woman in Seattle. She was a lingerie model. He was interested in getting to know her. She sent pictures. He said Los Angeles Fashion Week was coming, and did she want to visit? She did. More:

Does Pakistan have no shame?

Published on February 12, 2009 in Pakistan and Women. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Asks Fatima Bhutto in The Daily Beast, reporting on a campaign on intimidation as the government is trying to force rape victim Mukhtaran Mai to drop her case

mukhtaran1In 2002, an illiterate woman named Mukhtaran Mai was punished for something her brother did. He committed the unforgivable crime of falling in love with a young woman outside his tribe. So, in accordance with tribal tradition, a local council of elders decided that instead of punishing him directly, his sister Mai would be gang raped and paraded across her small village of Meerwala half naked.

Five days after this rape occurred, Mai did the unthinkable: She pressed charges.

Her defiance of custom—reporting the rape instead of silently accepting it—made headlines worldwide. Nicholas Kristof and Time magazine championed her case. Glamour magazine declared Mai “Woman of the Year.” But now, the Pakistan government has shown that it holds her in considerably lower esteem.

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Scarlett Keeling: What her mother had to see

Published on March 12, 2008 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Andrew Buncombe, The Independent’s Asia correspondent, on his blog Asian (con)Fusion:

Last week, at a cafe in Anjuna Beach that specialises in organic food, the mother of Scarlett Keeling showed me some photographs that I didn’t really want to see.

The photographs were taken during the first post-mortem tests carried out on Scarlett and unlike the written report itself, the photographs revealed the true extent of the teenager’s injuries. The pictures showed a huge bruise above one eye, a series of bruises on her legs and shins, red marks around the genital area and, most shocking of all, a picture of Scarlett’s face.

Because police claimed they did know who she was when her body was found, the pathologists had cut open her face to enable access to her teeth and to take a dental imprint to obtain her identity. They had then crudely sewn it back up. What was left looked like an horrendous, clown-like smile stitched across the teenager’s face.

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Who killed Scarlett Keeling?

Published on March 8, 2008 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

The man suspected of raping Scarlett Keeling, a 15-year-old British teenager found dead on Goa’s Anjuna beach on February 18, appeared in the local Goa court wearing a police hood. But Scarlett’s mother says she is not at all convinced that Samson D’Souza, the 26-year-old barman who worked at Lui’s Bar and was seen with Scarlett on the day she died, is the right man. She wants the country’s premier investigating agency to take over the case.

Read that story here.

goa.jpgThe case has rocked Indian and British media, following allegations of a police cover-up by Scarlett’s mother, Fiona MacKeown who refused to accept an initial post-mortem report that concluded that her daughter had drowned. Fiona has maintained all along that her daughter had been raped and murdered, pointing to the bruises and cuts on her body.

A second post mortem was ordered and found that Scarlett had indeed died of drowning. Significantly, it didn’t rule out homicide.

Meanwhile, media attention has also focused on Fiona MacKeown who left her 15-year-old daughter behind with the family of the local tour guide she had befriended. Fiona, her boyfriend and six other children headed off to a beach in the neighbouring state of Karnataka, leaving Scarlett behind in Goa. In the Daily Mail, Tom Rawstorne reports that Fiona is clear that she is not to blame

It was meant to be great family adventure – then 15-year-old Scarlett MacKeown was left alone by her mother in Goa. Days later she was dead. Murder… or a drunken accident? Here, her mother insists SHE wasn’t at fault.

As she tearfully retraced her teenage daughter’s last steps, Fiona MacKeown’s eye was caught by an object lying on the edge of the dusty track. It was a leather sandal — nothing special — but its discovery started a chain of events that has sent shockwaves through a part of the world still regarded by some as a corner of paradise.

Fiona knew at once that the shoe belonged to her daughter, 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling, whose body had been found on a nearby beach three days earlier.

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And is time running out for ‘tourist paradise’ Goa? Andrew Buncombe in The Morung Express reports from Anjuna

From his vantage point on a cushion in Anjuna’s German Bakery and Café, Thomas Keller smiled nostalgically as he recalled first coming to Goa more than three decades ago. “It was 1974,” said the wiry 53-year-old from Denmark. “[Then] it was serious hard-core hippies. Now everybody can come and go.” And that may be the problem for Goa. When people like Mr Keller first arrived, they came overland, down the hippy trail that wound from Turkey through Iran and Afghanistan to this tiny former Portuguese enclave on India’s western coast. They were few enough in number to blend in among the coastal villages, and if they were in a blissed-out haze on marijuana or hash a lot of the time, nobody minded too much.

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Finally, local Goa newspaper Navhind Times pays tribute to Fiona MacKeown in an editorial:

Goa police have started investigations along a new line into the death of the 15-year-old British girl Scarlett Keeling, but the loss that the state government and police – and collectively all of us Goans – have suffered during the three weeks in terms of image cannot be made up, no matter what we do. The adverse publicity we have got has not only damaged tourism but also our reputation as a state that can take up a case in the right earnest – without hiding or suppressing or manipulating facts – and go straight after the accused. How great a gratitude we owe to the mother of Scarlett, Fiona Mackeown! It was her tireless and determined fight for bringing the guilty to book that rocked the international and Indian media and forced the state government to take immediate steps to ensure fair play and justice to the deceased girl and her family.

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My struggle will continue: Bilkis Bano

Published on January 22, 2008 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

CNN-IBN’s Arunima spoke to Bilkis Bano after a special CBI court sentenced 11 people to life imprisonment for rape

It seems justice may finally have been delivered in one of the most shocking cases of the post Godhra riots. The special CBI court on Monday sentenced 11 people to double life imprisonment for rape in the Bilkis Bano case.

Bilkis says she knows she’s won a landmark judgement, but the battle has only just begun. CNN-IBN’s Arunima spoke to Bilkis after the verdict.

Arunima: Has justice been done?

Bilkis Bano: Justice has been delivered six years later. Eleven people have been sentenced but the policemen involved have gone scot free. So my struggle will continue will they are punished.

Arunima: Was it a lonely battle?

Bilkis Bano: A lot of people helped me. They encouraged me not to give up, not to get scared and continue the fight. Without them I couldn’t have achieved this.

Arunima: Do you feel safe about your child’s future in Gujarat?

Bilkis Bano: I want my children to have proper education, a good upbringing and a peaceful life.

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The Bilkis Bano case

Published on January 19, 2008 in Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Mail Today has a package on the Bilkis Bano rape case, with interviews and comments. Hartosh Singh Bal compares her with Zaheera Shaikh.

The Bilkis Bano case may well become the benchmark for how cases related to the Gujarat riots need to be handled. After the Best Bakery case, Bilkis’ story was perhaps symbolic of the quest for justice in the state. The similarities in the two cases are obvious — a young woman who is the key witness to murder by rioting mobs, and the delay and the frustration of obtaining justice till the Supreme Court intervenes and ensures the case is heard in Mumbai. 
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And, this is the report 

Justice came on Friday for Bilkis Yakoob Rasool alias Bilkis Bano — survivor and living reminder of Gujarat’s post-Godhra communal carnage. A sessions court in Mumbai held 13 of the 20 accused, including an assistant police inspector, guilty of gang-raping Bano, who was five-month pregnant then, and murdering 14 members of her family in 2002.

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