Police in Barabanki district allegedly confined a 16-year-old rape complainant for hours at two police stations on different days, allowed the accused and his friends to mock her, and got her guardian to sign on blank sheets.

The maternal uncle of the girl, who is an orphan, said the police asked a friend of the accused to transfer Rs 50,000 to his bank account. Then they allegedly got the uncle to sign on blank sheets, and said he had confessed to having filed a false complaint.

As the matter reached senior police officers on Sunday, Barabanki superintendent
of police Dinesh Kumar Singh suspended Manoj Kumar, an inspector. He also withdrew Arun Pratap Singh, station house officer of Masauli, from active duty and attached him to the police lines.

On Monday, the police arrested Ankit Verma, the accused.

The girl’s maternal uncle said a villager told him on August 22 that Ankit had pulled his niece into his car and sped away.

“I filed a police complaint that day but they did nothing to trace her. The accused dropped her near my home on August 25,” he told reporters.

“I took her to (the local) Trilokpur police station at 11am but they kept us waiting till 11pm. Nor did they let us step out of the police station.”

He alleged that the police called Ankit and his friends over in the evening.

“They misbehaved with her and ridiculed her. While we sat on the ground at the police station for hours, the police offered Ankit a chair…. The police told us that night that they had filed a case and asked us to leave,” the maternal uncle said.

“They called me and my niece the next day to come and sign some papers. But there were four blank sheets. A friend of the accused transferred Rs 50,000 into my account and a policeman said the case had been closed because I had entered into an agreement with them saying I had filed a false case.”

The uncle was later able to contact a deputy superintendent of police. Then, he says, he received a summons from the nearby but non-jurisdictional Masauli police station on August 30.

He says he and the girl went there in the evening and “were not allowed to leave till the next day”.

“They mounted pressure on us to stop trying to meet senior officers. I then filed a complaint on the chief minister’s portal,” the uncle said.

The girl’s father was murdered in 2018 and her mother committed suicide. Since then, she has been living with her maternal uncle.

He said the girl had told him that while she was in captivity, the accused would force her to take some painkillers.