Eight persons were arrested in Ayodhya on Friday on the charge of alleged gang-rape of a college student, who is also a cleaning staff at the Ram Janmabhoomi temple.

The victim has said in her complaint with the police that Vansh Chaudhary, a resident of Sahadatganj in Ayodhya district, had promised her that he would take her to places in the district “for recreation”.

“He took me to a guest house on August 16 and confined me there. He, along with his two other friends, gang-raped me and then invited three more friends to traumatise me,” she stated, identifying herself as a third-year BA student in a degree college in Ayodhya town. She also works as a cleaning staff at the Ram Janmabhoomi temple.

“From the guest house, they took me to a barrage in Banvirpur and again assaulted me. They released me on August 18,” she said identifying two other accused — Vinay Kumar and Mohammad Shariq.

“As I feared for my family members and my life because they had threatened to kill all of us, I didn’t go to the police. But Vansh again abducted me on August 25 when I was going to the temple. There were Udit Kumar, Satram Chaudhary and two unidentified persons with him. They tried to assault me in the car but rammed into a divider and I got time to run away from their clutches,” a police source quoted her as saying in the complaint on Thursday.

The areas the girl identified as places of crime are high-security zones in the temple town. The girl told local reporters that she had first gone to the police on August 26 but her case was not registered.

Amrendra Singh, the in-charge of Cantt police station in Ayodhya, said: “We registered the case on September 2 after an inquiry and eventually arrested all eight accused. They were sent to jail from the court.”

The officer said the girl trusted Vansh because she had known him for the last four years.