Gurgaon: National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has taken suo motu cognisance of a case involving five minors who were picked up from an under-construction site, held captive and tortured for 18 hours in DLF Phase 3 over a week ago, and asked the Gurgaon police commissioner to submit a report regarding the incident within two weeks.NHRC issued the notice on Wednesday, referring to the incident as a “serious violation of human rights of the victims”. “We have received the notice and will follow the orders. Accordingly, we will submit a reply within the time given by the commission,” Gurgaon police spokesperson, ASI Sandeep Turan, told TOI.The incident happened on Feb 2, when the boys, aged 10-13, were abducted and locked in a room at a PG building in U-Block under false suspicions of theft. The mother of one of the boys, who filed a police complaint based on which an FIR was registered, said that the incident traumatised the children, adding that her son has stopped attending school and is terrified to go outside to play.According to the police complaint, a group of six men—identified as Harindra Lohia, Feroz Khan, Mohammad Jamauil, Deepak, Pradeep, and Sachin—carried out a series of assaults while in a state of intoxication. An FIR was registered on Feb 3 under BNS sections 115 (voluntarily causing hurt), 127 (2) (wrongful restraint /confinement), 287 (negligent conduct with respect to fire or combustible matter), 3 (5) (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention), 351 (3) (criminal intimidation) and under section 10 (punishment for aggravated penetrative sexual assault) of the Pocso Act. The mother provided a harrowing account of the violence to TOI. “My child and the other boys were not only beaten but subjected to unspeakable cruelty,” she said, adding that “These men used heated electric bulbs to inflict burns on the boys and poured petrol on their genitalia.”The mother, who eventually tracked the children to the room, said that she was met with verbal abuse and forced to sit on the floor under threat of violence. “They eventually released us, but issued a death threat, warning that if we reported the matter, they would kill us all,” she added.The woman works as a helper in a school and is the sole breadwinner of her family. She said she moved from Bihar to Gurgaon to support her children. When she returned from work on the evening of Feb 2, she found her son missing. “When I finally located him the next morning, he was being held captive. The men told me to leave and come back in two hours, but I refused… I sat right there, enduring their humiliation, until I could take my child back home.”“I am a widow trying to work to support us, but now I have to cut my work hours or ensure his older brother guards him. We are simply too afraid to leave him alone,” she said.
