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Shortly after the nation went to bed on November 2, riding high on the victory of India’s women’s cricket squad in the ICC World Cup, a story of horror was, unbeknownst to others, unfolding in Coimbatore. As the world learned the next day, a 20-year-old college student had been gang-raped by three men in a deserted area near the compound wall of the Government Polytechnic College (GPT). The incident came to light after the woman’s boyfriend, who had earlier been assaulted with a sickle by the attackers, called the police to report it. Investigators combed the vast vacant plots on the west and southern sides of Brindhavan Nagar, a quiet residential area near the airport, and the arterial Avinashi Road, while the perpetrators fled via an exit route to the adjacent Avinashi Road. According to investigators, the three men allegedly forced the woman to scale a compound wall separating Brindhavan Nagar from the scene of the crime around 4 a.m. on November 3. The woman, in intense trauma, immediately sought refuge in the lane where she landed after climbing the wall. She pressed the doorbell of a house nearby, but when it did not work, she scaled the rather small compound wall in desperation. A man who helped the survivor told The Hindu that she knocked on the door and even switched on an electric motor to draw attention. However, the residents were asleep. Finding no response, she climbed the stairs to the terrace and managed to hop onto the verandah of a first-floor apartment in an adjacent building. The woman kept knocking on the door of the first-floor apartment, prompting the residents to open a window and find her in a state of panic, crying for help. As the family struggled to comprehend what had happened, they called their neighbours, who rushed to the scene. Meanwhile, the distressed woman climbed down to the ground floor and continued knocking on the door. The resident of the ground-floor house, who requested anonymity, said he did not hear the knocks as he had stayed up late watching the World Cup final, including the post-match ceremony. “My wife was away and hence, the woman from the first floor contacted her and informed her of the matter. Though the neighbours and my wife rang me a few times, I was fast asleep. I woke up around 10 minutes later and walked to the door. The light on the porch was on and I was wondering who was outside. I saw a woman through a window, and asked why she was standing on the porch,” he said. The woman panicked, saying she was fleeing from three men, who assaulted her boyfriend on a vacant plot of land nearby, around 50-70 metres off a mud path connecting Brindhavan Nagar and SIHS Colony. In the meantime, the neighbours also came around. “I told her: ‘You are safe here. Nobody will harm you,’” the eyewitness said. “She wanted to speak to her mother over the phone, and I gave her my phone. We gave her some water and a replacement for her torn clothes,” he added. Two men from the neighbourhood had rushed to the vacant plot of land abutting Brindhavan Nagar, where they found police personnel searching for the abducted woman. The police, on learning about the woman’s location, hurried to the house at around 4.20 a.m. and took her to a private hospital nearby. Heinous crime Police officers involved in the initial stages of the investigation recounted the circumstances leading up to when they rescued the woman: she and her 25-year-old boyfriend arrived at the vacant land in the latter’s car between 10.50 p.m. and 11 p.m. on the night of November 2. According to the police, three men on a moped approached the car while the occupants were chatting inside. The men were drunk and carried an additional bottle of liquor. One of them smashed a car window with a stone, while another cracked the front windscreen with a sickle. As the woman’s boyfriend stepped out of the car, the assailant with the sickle tried to attack him. He grabbed the weapon in self defence, sustaining cuts on his hand. The assailant struck him again on the head, and another assailant hit him with a stone, causing him to lose consciousness. The police said that the trio, later identified as T. Karuppasamy alias Satheesh, 30, and his brother T. Kaleeswaran alias Karthik, 21, of Singampunari in Sivagangai district, and a relative M. Guna alias Thavasi, 20, of Madurai district, forcibly took the woman to a secluded area behind the GPT campus, after scaling a 6-7 feet compound wall separating the vacant plots and the campus. The survivor’s boyfriend alerted the control room at around 11.20 p.m. after regaining consciousness, and the police reached the spot in 10 minutes, eventually resulting in a combing operation involving 100 personnel for the abducted woman and the perpetrators. They naturally presumed that the survivor was in the trio’s custody, when combing the locality. Coimbatore City Police Commissioner A. Saravana Sundar said the police could not locate the perpetrators and the survivor due to the darkness and dense thickets at the scene of crime. A senior police officer said that a tracker dog from the city police’s K9 squad was brought to the spot to assist in the search. However, the dog ran in a different direction after sniffing the belongings of the woman in the car. Police personnel in large numbers also searched along the two directions of the adjacent twin rail line, suspecting the abductors could have chosen the tracks as they are largely not covered by surveillance cameras. “I joined the police team searching along the track when officers came to our residential area,” said a student of the Coimbatore Institute of Technology, whose campus shares a boundary with the vacant plots and the GPT campus. Manhunt for perpetrators Seven police teams were formed to nab the perpetrators, and they examined footage from nearly 300 surveillance cameras. A few clips showing the accused escaping on foot after the crime turned out to be the breakthrough that helped crack the case. The moped left behind by the perpetrators near the abduction site was another key piece of evidence that helped locate the trio. The Kovilpalayam police in Coimbatore Rural had been on the lookout for Kaleeswaran — who was identified during the investigation into the gang rape — in connection with the theft of a moped a few days before the crime. Investigators also found that the trio, who were residing in Irugur, about 4 km from the scene of the crime, had been absconding since the night of November 2. Mr. Sundar said the accused were zeroed in on based on digital evidence, including surveillance camera footage, and were later traced to a deserted location at Vellakinar, about 15 km from the scene of the crime, around 10.45 p.m. on November 3. The police arrested them after shooting them in the legs when they assaulted a Head Constable with a weapon. The survivor’s mobile phone and her gold ring were recovered from the accused after the arrest. Siblings and history-sheeters While the siblings Karuppasamy and Kaleeswaran had been residing in Coimbatore for around 10 years, doing odd jobs for a living, Guna started residing with them only a few months ago. Mr. Sundar said the siblings were history-sheeters, who had been booked in a murder-for-gain case at Kinathukadavu in Coimbatore Rural in 2021. Kaleeswaran was a minor back then. Karuppasamy had been booked by the Thirumuruganpoondi police in Tiruppur in 2023, for allegedly robbing a woman of her five-sovereign gold chain. Before their arrest in connection with the gang rape, Karuppasamy had been involved in four criminal cases and Kaleeswaran in seven, according to police records. They had been released on statutory bail in some of the cases after spending time in judicial custody. The three accused were arrested for offences under Sections 296 B, 118 (1), 324 (4), 140 (3), and 309 (4) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), based on the initial complaint lodged by the survivor’s boyfriend. The police later added Section 70 (gang rape) of BNS against them, based on the statement of the survivor. The survivor, who is being given counselling, and her boyfriend, are in hospital. Karuppasamy and Guna suffered gunshot wounds on both legs, while Kaleeswaran sustained a gunshot wound to one leg. They are undergoing treatment at the Coimbatore Medical College Hospital while in judicial custody. Mr. Sundar added that a test identification parade will be conducted after the accused recover from their injuries. A police officer privy to the investigation said that the accused needed to be interrogated in detail using digital evidence, such as mobile tower location data, to verify whether they had been frequenting the scene of the crime for similar offences. The investigating team, headed by a woman inspector, is racing against time to complete the probe. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, who condemned the crime as “inhuman” and a “cruel offence,” instructed the police on November 4 to file the charge-sheet within a month and ensure that the accused receive the highest punishment. Political backlash The gang rape incident also stirred widespread outrage against the ruling DMK. Besides condemning the incident, Opposition parties attacked the government, raising concerns on the safety of women in the State. AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami stated that the DMK government was compromising on women’s safety. “Does a police force even exist in Tamil Nadu?” he asked in a post on X after the gang rape. In another post, he asked why the police could not find the woman for four hours and 25 minutes. BJP Tamil Nadu president Nainar Nagenthran and Coimbatore South MLA Vanathi Srinivasan lashed out at the Chief Minister for his governance, which had “pushed Coimbatore far from the status of being the safest place for women.” Questioning the government on women’s safety, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) president Vijay said the gang rape in Coimbatore occurred while the trauma of the Anna University student was still fresh. He was referring to the sexual assault on a student of the university in Chennai in December 2024. In the aftermath of the grave crime, the city police have intensified night patrols in all deserted and vacant areas across the limits of its 20 stations.
