During the day, the bus ferried school students. At night, the owner left the bus with the crew, unmindful of what they did.
Unknown to the young couple, the men on board the bus had sometime earlier robbed a man of money and dumped him. He went to police, who did not take his complaint seriously.
It was the second blunder of the day that was to lead to a horrific crime that stunned and shamed India.
According to police who later put together the sequence of events, once the bus began moving, the six men in the bus caught hold of the woman and dragged her to the back.
She resisted, and so they beat her. The young man was also assaulted when he tried to fight them.
Then followed an agonizing 40 minutes when the bus crew gang-raped the woman. If that was not enough, one or more than one of them tortured her with an iron rod.
