KOCHI, India: Police in India’s southern state of Kerala have arrested 44 men accused of raping an 18-year-old girl over a period of five years, a police official said on Tuesday, in a case that has shocked the coastal tourist resort.
The victim, an athlete who belongs to the so-called lower caste community known as Dalits, told police in a statement that she was sexually abused by 62 people over a period of five years.
Police have identified 58 of those men, some of whom are minors and arrested 44 over the last two days, officials said.
“We have identified the remaining 14 and they would be arrested soon,” the Deputy Superintendent of Police in the Pathanamthitta district where the crimes took place, PS Nandakumar, told Reuters.
The case came to light after the girl narrated the gang rape to a volunteer during a gender awareness program. Nandkumar, who heads the investigation, said details of how the crimes were committed were still being investigated.
In her statement to the police, the victim said the abuse began when she was 13 after her neighbor allegedly raped her.
Local media reported that four of the accused were minors.
Under Indian law, accused in rape cases that involve lower castes do not immediately get bail. Reuters was not able to reach any of the accused for a comment.
There were more than 31,000 reported rapes in 2022 in India, the latest year for which data is available, and conviction rates are notoriously low.
The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in the eastern city of Kolkata caused outrage across the country last year, with protests and street marches calling for action against the accused.

HELSINKI: The NATO military alliance said Tuesday it would launch a Baltic Sea monitoring mission following the suspected sabotage of undersea cables in recent months.
Several telecom and power cables have been severed with experts and politicians accusing Russia of orchestrating a hybrid war against the West as the two sides square off over Ukraine.
The “Baltic Sentry” mission would involve “frigates and maritime patrol aircraft” among other assets, NATO chief Mark Rutte said at a regional meeting in Finland’s capital Helsinki on Tuesday.
But he declined to give details on the number of vessels “because that might differ from one week to another” and he did not want to make “the enemy any wiser than he or she is already.”
NATO was also tight-lipped on the duration, saying in a statement the operation would continue “for an undisclosed amount of time.”
The suspected sabotage has been blamed on a “shadow fleet” of vessels — often aging and operating under opaque ownership — that carry Russian crude oil and petroleum products, embargoed since the invasion of Ukraine.
“Investigations of all of these cases are still ongoing, but there is reason for grave concern,” Rutte said.
He said protecting undersea infrastructure was of “utmost importance” not only for energy supplies but also for Internet traffic.
Leaders of NATO’s Baltic countries said in a statement after the Helsinki meeting that the shadow fleet “poses a particular threat to the maritime and environmental security in the Baltic Sea region and globally.”
They said the fleet “significantly supports funding of Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said foreign ministries from the Baltic Sea NATO states would set up a group of legal experts to assess what they could do without affecting freedom of navigation.
NATO said in late December it would increase its presence in the region but had not announced an operation.
Iro Sarkka, a researcher from the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told AFP that NATO had been pushed into action by the Russian shadow fleet.
A comprehensive operation would serve as a “deterrent and a strategic signal” that NATO was prepared to act, according to Sarkka.
Tensions have mounted around the Baltic Sea since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
A series of underwater blasts ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe in September 2022, the cause of which has yet to be determined.
In October 2023, an undersea gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was shut down after it was damaged by the anchor of a Chinese cargo ship.
Two telecom cables in Swedish waters were severed on November 17-18 last year.
And weeks later, on December 25, the Estlink 2 electricity cable and four telecom cables linking Finland and Estonia were damaged.
Investigators suspect the cables were damaged by the anchor of the Eagle S, a Cook Island-flagged oil tanker believed to be part of the “shadow fleet.”
Finnish police seized the Eagle S on December 28 as part of a criminal investigation.
Finnish authorities last week deemed the ship unseaworthy, barred it from sailing and have banned eight crew members from leaving the country while police carry out a probe.