JAIPUR A court on Friday sentenced three Indian men to 20 years in prison for raping a Japanese student who was sightseeing in one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations.
Prosecutors said the men met the 20-year-old woman in Jaipur known for its historic forts and monuments, and they offered to be her tour guides.
The men, aged 20 to 24, took the woman to a farming village outside the city, raped her on a roadside and fled. Villagers heard the woman crying and helped her contact police.
Judge Girish Oja held the three guilty and sentenced them on Friday in a trial that lasted five months.
Oja sentenced three other defendants to two years in prison for helping the three main accused commit the crime.
The Japanese student left India for home in April after recording her statement in the case.
The rape in February was the second of a Japanese visitor in less than a year.
A series of attacks has triggered public fury over India’s inability to halt chronic violence against women despite strengthening laws against sex crimes in 2013.
In December last year, a 22-year-old research scholar from Japan was held captive and gang raped for nearly three weeks in a village near a Buddhist pilgrimage center in eastern Bihar state.
Police have arrested four suspects in that case, which also involved a tour guide who had offered to help the woman with sightseeing. She escaped from captivity on Dec. 26 and fled to the eastern city of Kolkata. The four are being tried on rape charges.
Both trials were fast-tracked, as all rape trials are now under the reforms introduced in 2013.
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