India police arrest six in new gang rape case

NEW DELHI - Indian police arrested six people including a bus driver after a woman said she was gang raped in the northern state of Punjab, newspapers said on Sunday.

The reports come weeks after a student in Delhi was assaulted and beaten in a moving bus and thrown bleeding onto the street in a case that sparked outrage in the country.

Six men with their faces covered, accused of a gang rape in Punjab are escorted by police to a court at Gurdaspur in the northern Indian state of Punjab January 13, 2013. Six men have been arrested over the rape of a passenger on a bus in Punjab, police said on Sunday, local media reported. [Photo/Agencies]

In the latest assault, the woman was travelling by bus to her village on Friday night when the driver and his assistant drove her to a deserted location, the Indian Express newspaper said.

Five more people joined them later and assaulted the woman in a house, the paper quoted senior police superintendent Raj Jeet Singh as saying.

The men dropped the woman the next morning near her village. She went home before going to a police station to file a complaint. Six of the seven men accused of the crime have been arrested, the police officer told the paper.

A Punjab police spokesman could not be reached for comment.

After the physiotherapy student was raped and beaten in Delhi, millions of Indians took to the streets demanding the death penalty for her attackers and official action to reduce the number of assaults on women.

The student died in a Singapore hospital from internal injuries, two week after she was attacked. Five men have been charged with her rape and murder.