Trio accused of raping Japanese student remanded in custody

Three Indian men accused of kidnapping and gang-raping a Japanese student in Bihar were remanded into custody.

The men arrived at court in Kolkata in a police van and were whisked into the building through a scrum of reporters and bystanders, their faces concealed by cloth to prevent them from being identified.

"So today they have brought two more persons of this alleged rape case from Bihar as transit passengers and they produced before this court, chief metropolitan magistrate and magistrate sent them to JC (judicial custody) as because police plead for TI parade that is why they are being sent to jail for TI parade," Kolkata's chief police prosecutor Tapan Kumar Shah told reporters following the hearing.

The trio are among a group of five men who have been arrested so far in connection with the alleged abduction and gang-rape of the 23-year-old Japanese tourist.

The woman had filed a complaint through the Japanese consulate in Kolkata saying she had been staying in a budget hotel in the city in November when three local men who spoke Japanese befriended her and took her to the seaside resort of Digha in West Bengal.

According to Kolkata police, she said they had robbed her of 76,000 rupees using her ATM card, and then taken her to Bodh Gaya, a major Buddhist pilgrimage and tourist centre in Bihar.

There, she alleged that two more men joined them and raped her.

A senior police officer from Gaya identified two of the suspects as local men.

"After registering the case, the Kolkata police sought help from Gaya police, which led to the arrest of two of the accused- Sabir Khan and Sajid Khan-who hail from Fatehpur," said Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP), Baliram Kumar Chaudhary.

Villagers gathered outside the family home of one of the accused men, Sajid Khan on Saturday.

His tearful wife told reporters that the student had stayed at their house for a week.

Dismissing the allegations against her husband, she accused the police of assaulting family members when they came to arrest Sajid.