KOLKATA (Web Desk) – The Anglo-Indian woman who hit national headlines as the Park Street rape victim in early 2012 died at a state-run hospital in Kolkata on Friday morning around 6:30.
She was admitted to Calcutta Medical College on late on Thursday night and was being treated at the critical care unit. Though hospital sources confirmed her death, they could not say say yet whether the death was due to encephalitis or meningitis.
She was around 40 and used to live with her two school-going daughters in the southern fringes of the city.
According to initial reports she died of multi-organ failure.
On the night of April 5, 2012 she was gang-raped in a moving car (Honda City) that she boarded with a group of strangers after befriending them at a prominent night club on Park Street. The next day when she went to lodge a complaint at Park Street police station, some of the policemen on scoffed at her.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee courted one of her earliest controversies when she famously said that the hue and cry over the incident was an attempt to malign her government and the incident was cooked up. One of Trinamool MPs, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, also commented that the incident was one of a deal gone awry between a woman of questionable character, and her prospective clients.
But later Kolkata Police in its charge sheet confirmed gangrape and the incident is now in the court. The charge sheet named five youths.
Kader Khan, one of the key accused, is still absconding and believed to be in Bangladesh.
During the three years following the incident, the woman used to frequently say that her life had become a miserable one. She claimed that she lost her job after the incident, and that avoiding curious glare and comments from many made her condition unbearable.
Last year she wrote on her Facebook post that she was thrown out of a restaurant at Hazra in south Kolkata on the grounds of her identity.
