The Ahmedabad City Police after 1 am on Monday (August 10), confirmed that they had shot and injured the man who had been arrested on Sunday for allegedly raping a 23-year-old design student on the terrace of the building where she lives on rent.
The incident took place on Sunday night when the police had taken the accused, Dharam Singh Ramshankar Singh, for recovery and panchnama of the woman’s mobile phone which the accused had allegedly stolen during the rape late evening on Saturday.
Visuals from the hospital showed police vehicles peeling into the trauma ward of the GMERS Sola Civil Hospital on SG Highway and, later, the accused lying on a stretcher with a bandage around a singular gunshot wound on his right foot.
Speaking to the media outside the Hospital, Zone-7 DCP Shivam Varma said, “Dharam Singh Ramshankar Singh had been arrested by the police on Sunday. After his medical tests and drawing of DNA samples, he was taken by the police to the Hebatpur area of the city to recover the mobile phone of the victim, which he had stolen.”
“During the process of this recovery panchnama, the accused, in an attempt to escape police custody, tried to snatch the service revolver of PI RS Parmar. A scuffle ensued and Constable Virendrasinh was hurt in the process. An officer fired two rounds at the leg of the accused, one of which hit him. The condition of the accused and the injured Constable is stable.”
An FIR of attempt to commit culpable homicide will be filed at Bodakdev police station against the accused person, said DCP Varma.
Earlier on Sunday, speaking about the incident and the arrest of the accused, Joint Commissioner of Police (Sector 1) Neeraj Badgujar had said that the accused Dharam Singh had sneaked up on the woman while she was taking an after-dinner walk on the roof of her apartment building around 10.30 pm on Saturday. He had allegedly thrown a wire around her neck and tightened it, constricting her breathing and causing her to collapse.
“He raped her after she blacked out due to the strangulation,” Badgujar had said.
After committing the crime, the accused allegedly escaped after bolting the door of the terrace from the outside, the police have said. After the woman came to, she raised an alarm, and was heard by others in the building.
The police had deployed 10 teams to apprehend the accused and he had been arrested near Hebatpur, where they had taken later on Sunday night to recover the phone of the victim which he had allegedly stolen.
The accused belongs originally to Uttar Pradesh, and had come to work as a security guard in the woman’s apartment complex only four days before the alleged rape, police had said on Sunday.
