AMRITSAR, Jan 13: Six men have been arrested over the rape of a passenger on a coach in India, police said on Sunday, weeks after the gang-rape and murder of a student on a bus in New Delhi sparked nationwide protests.

The victim had boarded the service to her in-laws’ home in the northern state of Punjab when she was abducted on Friday and driven to a district bordering the city of Amritsar, local police officer Raj Jeet Singh said.

Five men joined the driver and conductor, who had taken her by motorbike to an unknown address, and took turns to rape the victim before dropping her off near her in-laws’ village on Saturday morning, he said.

“Six men have been arrested on allegations of having raped a 29-year-old woman... after forcibly taking her to an unknown location on the night of January 11,” the policeman said, adding that a seventh suspect was being hunted.

“After raping the victim throughout the night, one of the accused dropped her near her in-laws’ house the next morning where she narrated the whole incident to her two sisters-in-law.”

Mr Singh said the extent of her injuries had yet to be established. Police arrested the men late on Saturday.

The attack is disturbingly similar to the Dec 16 gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi, where five men are on trial in a case that has fuelled anger across India over the alarming incidence of sexual assault.

Partap Singh Bajwa, a local Congress Party politician in Punjab, where the latest gang-rape took place, blamed the police for not enforcing stringent checks on buses operating in the state.

“It all happened due to laxity of police as they never bother to check out the buses moving on national highways during night time,” Mr Bajwa said.In a separate incident in western India, reported by the Press Trust of India (PTI), police arrested a 32-year-old man on Saturday for allegedly abducting, raping and killing a nine-year-old girl.

Police told PTI the suspect allegedly kidnapped the child on Dec 28 last year in the temple town of Shirdi in Maharashtra state before dumping her body near the railway station, where it was discovered on Friday night.—AFP