Outery, questions over woman dragged by car

Outrage mounted on Monday over the grisly death of a 20-year-old woman who was dragged under a car for at least two hours and found dead on the road in the early hours of New Year's Day, but niggling questions about the sequence of events that led to the horrific incident continued to trouble investigators.

- Hemani Bhandari and Sanjeev K Jha

NEW DELHI: 

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal called for the death penalty for the five men, suspected to be drunk, in the car and arrested for culpable homicide, even as his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and lieutenant governor VK Saxena, who controls Delhi Police, were locked in a political battle.

Police say that the five men in a grey Maruti Suzuki Baleno hit the woman who was riding a scooty along with a friend in Sultanpuri; the impact entangled her body to the underside of the car; unaware of this, the men drove on from the accident site, dragging her body for at least 14km, before it dislodged in a mangled state and was found by local residents.

But as protests raged on the streets of the Capital on Monday, more questions and inconsistencies emerged about the crime, and how it occurred. Late in the police said it had evening, detained the woman's friend who was riding the scooty with her, and who allegedly fled after the accident. The two women worked for an event management company and were on their way back from an event in a nearby area, police said.

Police said the five men had borrowed a friend's car and were on their way back after drinking and eating when they hit the woman in Sultanpuri.

The first call was received by the police control room at 1.45am about a metallic blue scooty found on the road in Sultanpuri, indicating that the alleged accident happened either at this time or earlier. The first information report mentioned the time of accident as 2am. There is yet no CCTV footage or eyewitnesses of the alleged accident.

At 2.30am, police say the control room received a call from a resident of Vijay Vihar, who said he saw a car dragging along a body in Aman VIhar about 10-12km from where the body was found. It is not clear how this call was followed up or acted upon.