Mumbai: Mumbai Police crime branch officials today took all the five accused to the scene of crime in Shakti Mill compound in Mahalaxmi where a 23-year-old female photojournalist was gang raped on August 22.
Police officers tried to reconstruct the scene of gangrape. On Tuesday, forensic experts had collected evidences from the scene of crime.
HImanshu Roy, joint commissioner of police (crime) was also present at the spot. Roy said: " We brought all the accused here in order to reconstruct the crime, which will help us in investigation. We have taken the help of eyewitnesses and forensic experts. We want to ensure that all the five accused are given stringent punishment."
Roy said: "We will also conduct tests of the accused, whose relatives claim they are juveniles. All the accused are low type criminals and we are investigating from all angles."
The Joint CP appealed to all previous gang rape victims to come forward before the police and report crimes conducted by this gang.
"We will keep their identities confidential. We are trying to recover the photos of all gangrape victims from the cellphones of the accused. We will slap IT Act provisions against them too", he added.
"The purpose of reconstructing the crime scene is to ensure that the entire case is prosecuted without any errors or weaknesses", Roy said.
Nearly 50 Crime Branch officers alongwith all five accused were at the scene of crime for nearly two and a half hours searching for more evidences.
Roy told India TV that the entire crime was the result of a conspiracy hatched by the gang. "We will slap Sec 120B (criminal conspiracy) and IT Act provisions against them. We have forwarded their cellphones for backups to IT experts, so that all the damning pics can be recovered."
"We are also conducting impotency tests for the accused, so that their lawyers cannot claim that the accused were not physically capable of rape", Roy said.
The victim, an intern with an English magazine, was allegedly raped by the five accused when she had gone to the desolate Shakti Mills premises on August 22 with a male colleague on an assignment. Her colleague is a prime witness in the case.
The reconstruction of events that led to the crime was video-recorded, police sources said.
All five accused - Salim Ansari, Vijay Jadhav, Chand Babu Sattar Shaikh, Mohammed Kasim Hafiz Shaikh alias Kasim Bengali and Siraj Rehman Khan - are in the custody of the Mumbai Crime Branch.
Police had earlier said that when Salim made a phone call to Kasim Bengali, asking him to immediately reach Shakti mills on the day of the crime, the latter was present in a shanty with Chand, Siraj and one more person. "That person has been found and made a witness in the case," he said.
Yesterday, two teams from Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Delhi, and Gujarat Forensic Science Laboratory, carrying advanced equipment, thoroughly examined the crime scene for nearly three hours to gather evidence to build a water-tight case against the accused.
The team from Gujarat also had two psychiatrists who conducted Layered Voice Analysis (LVA) on the accused. LVA is a technique designed for truth verification and detection of deceit. It helps measure the emotional content of human speech, captured live or extracted from recorded audio.
Police have also conducted searches at the homes of the accused and recovered clothes including undergarments.
Responding to a query about the victim being forced to clean the crime scene after the brutal act, a police official had earlier replied in the affirmative but said plenty of evidence was still collected from the spot.
