5 plead not guilty to India gang rape, murder

India gang-rape trial: Indians shout during a protest demanding the death penalty for five men and one youth accused of the fatal Dec. 16 gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi. IMAGE

AP Photo: Altaf Qadri. India gang-rape trial: Indians shout during a protest demanding the death penalty for five men and one youth accused of the fatal Dec. 16 gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi. IMAGE

2/2/13 By Annie Banerji

The five men, who filed into the court with their faces covered, all entered not guilty pleas. Their trial is set to begin Tuesday.

NEW DELHI — Five men pleaded not guilty Saturday to charges they raped and murdered an Indian physiotherapy student, in a case that led to a shake-up of laws against sexual crimes after protests about a rising number of attacks on women.

Police say the gang lured the 23-year-old woman onto a bus in New Delhi, where they repeatedly raped and assaulted her with a metal bar before throwing her bleeding onto a highway. She died of internal injuries two weeks after the Dec. 16 attack.

A Reuters witness saw the men file into the courtroom with their faces covered where lawyers in the case said they were read 13 charges including murder, which carries a maximum penalty of death. They left after 15 minutes.

"After the judge read out the charges, the five pleaded not guilty and walked out" said A.P. Singh, a lawyer defending two of the accused, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Thakur.

Singh said the prosecution will call three witnesses to the next hearing Tuesday, which is the formal start of the trial. The prosecution said it has strong evidence against the five men including blood-stained clothing, DNA, mobile-phone records, confessions and eyewitness statements.

Singh says Sharma was never on the bus and Thakur was hiding beneath a seat and never took part in the crime.

The other men — brothers Ram and Mukesh Singh and Pawan Kumar — are represented by two other lawyers. Mukesh Singh has replaced a lawyer who claimed his client was tortured in police custody and no longer claims mistreatment.

A sixth person police said was part of the gang that attacked the woman and her friend is a juvenile and will be tried separately.

The brutality of the attack was shocking even to a nation accustom to a rising wave of sexual crimes against women. Thousands of young protesters took to the streets in the weeks that followed. In response to the public outcry, India's Cabinet on Friday fast-tracked new, tougher penalties for sex crimes.

Under the new rules, due to be signed into law by the president in the coming days, gang rape that leads to death will be punishable by death while minimum penalties will be raised to 20 years for gang rape and rape of a minor. The laws must later be ratified by the parliament.

Additional reporting by Suchitra Mohanty; writing by Frank Jack Daniel.

——

MSN News on Facebook and Twitter

Stay up to date on breaking news and current events.

Friend us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/news.msn

A golf ball-grabbing fox on the green, a toilet fit for Top Gear, and a teacher’s science experiment that leaves his students needing a change of clothes. These are some of the stories you just couldn’t afford to miss this week.

O.J. Simpson was back in court recently to try to overturn a 2008 armed robbery conviction. Here are other famous people who have spent time behind bars.

A tornado is a narrow, violently rotating column of air that extends from the base of a thunderstorm to the ground. Because wind is invisible, it is hard to see a tornado unless it forms a condensation funnel made up of water droplets, dust and debris. Tornadoes are the most violent of all atmospheric storms.