An 11-year-old Indian girl set on fire by a man who tried to rape her five days ago has died from her injuries, prompting her family to demand the death sentence for her attacker, the DNA newspaper reported on Monday.
The young girl was attacked on July 31 in the eastern state of West Bengal when she went out of her home to go to the toilet, said the report. When she resisted and threatened to reveal her attacker’s identity, he poured kerosene over her and set her alight.
"The minor was admitted with critical burns. Today (Sunday) morning, she succumbed to her injuries," Superintendent T.K. Ghosh, an official at the hospital where she was admitted, was quoted as saying.
The accused has been arrested and the girl's family is demanding the death sentence.
"If the government cannot give him death penalty, then it should hand him over to us so that we set him on fire in the same way as he did to our daughter," the mother of the minor was quoted as saying.
Girls and women face a barrage of threats in India – from rape, to acid attacks to domestic violence. In some cases, attackers set their victims on fire or blackmail them with mobile videos taken during the assault or threaten their families in order to stop them from reporting the crime.
There were 244,270 crimes against women reported in 2012 compared with 228,650 in 2011, according to the National Crimes Records Bureau (NCRB).
These include rape, kidnapping, sexual harassment, trafficking, molestation and cruelty by husbands and relatives. They also include crimes in which a woman was driven to suicide as a result of demands for a dowry from her husband or in-laws.
West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh, recorded the highest number of gender crimes at 30,942 – 12.7 percent of India's total recorded crimes against women, says the NCRB.
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