Shortly after the nation went to bed on November 2 riding the Indian women’s cricket team to victory in the ICC World Cup, a horror story was unfolding in Coimbatore unbeknownst to others.
As the world learned the other day, a 20-year-old college student was gang-raped by three men in a deserted area near the walls of the Government Polytechnic (GPT). The incident came to light after the woman’s boyfriend, who had earlier been attacked with a sickle by the assailants, called the police to report it. Investigators combed vast vacant plots on the west and south sides of Brindhavan Nagar, a quiet residential area near the airport and the main artery of Avinashi Road, while the perpetrators fled through an escape route to the adjacent Avinashi Road. According to investigators, three men allegedly forced the woman to climb the wall separating Brindhavan Nagar from the crime scene on November 3 around 4 am.
The woman, in intense trauma, immediately sought refuge in the lane where she fell after climbing over the wall. She pressed the doorbell of a nearby house, but when that didn’t work, she desperately scaled the rather small compound wall. The man who helped the survivor told The Hindu that she knocked on the door and even switched on the electric motor to attract attention.
However, the residents were asleep. Finding no answer, she climbed the stairs to the terrace and managed to jump onto the porch of the first-floor apartment next door.
The woman kept knocking on the door of the first-floor apartment, prompting residents to open the window to find her in a state of panic, calling for help. As the family struggled to understand what had happened, they called their neighbors who rushed to the scene. Meanwhile, the distressed woman went downstairs and kept knocking on the door.
A resident of the house on the ground floor, who requested anonymity, said he did not hear the knock because he had stayed up late watching the World Cup final, including the post-match ceremony.
“My wife was away, so the woman from the first floor contacted her and informed her about the matter. Although the neighbors and my wife rang me several times, I was sound asleep. I woke up after about 10 minutes and went to the door. The porch light was on and I wondered who was outside. I saw the woman through the window and asked why she was standing on the porch,” he said.
Panicking, the woman said she was running away from three men who attacked her friend in a vacant plot nearby, about 50-70 meters from the muddy road connecting Brindhavan Nagar and SIHS Colony. In the meantime, the neighbors also came by.
“I told her, ‘You’re safe here. Nobody’s going to hurt you,'” the eyewitness said. “She wanted to talk to her mother on the phone and I gave her my phone. We gave her some water and a replacement for her torn clothes,” he added. Two men from the neighborhood rushed to a vacant lot next to Brindhavan Nagar where they found policemen searching for the kidnapped woman. After learning about the woman’s whereabouts, the police rushed to the house at around 4.20am and took her to a nearby private hospital.
Heinous crime
Police officers involved in the initial stages of the investigation described the circumstances that led to the woman’s rescue: she and her 25-year-old boyfriend arrived at a vacant lot in the latter’s car on the night of November 2 between 10:50 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.
According to police, three men on a moped approached the car while the passengers inside were talking. The men were drunk and were carrying another bottle of liquor. One of them broke a car window with a rock, another broke the windshield with a sickle. As the woman’s boyfriend was getting out of the car, the sickle-wielding assailant tried to attack him. He grabbed a gun in self-defense and suffered cuts to his hand. The attacker hit him again on the head and another attacker hit him with a rock, knocking him unconscious.
Police said the trio, later identified as T. Karuppasamy alias Satheesh, 30, and his brother T. Kaleeswaran alias Karthik, 21, of Singampunari in Sivagangai district, and a relative M. Guna alias Thavasi, 20, of Madurai district, forcibly took the woman to a crime scene behind the Gludus camp. A 6-7 foot compound wall separating the vacant lots and the campus.
A friend of the survivor alerted the control room at around 11.20pm after regaining consciousness, and police arrived at the scene within 10 minutes, which eventually resulted in a manhunt for the kidnapped woman and the perpetrators with 100 personnel. While combing the site, they naturally assumed that the survivor was in the custody of the trio.
Coimbatore City Police Commissioner A. Saravana Sundar said the police could not find the perpetrators and survivors due to darkness and dense thickets at the crime scene.
The senior constable said a sniffer dog from the city’s police K9 unit was brought to the scene to assist in the search. However, after sniffing the woman’s belongings in the car, the dog ran in a different direction.
Police personnel in large numbers were also searching two directions of the adjacent double-track track, suspecting that the kidnappers may have picked their tracks as they are largely not covered by security cameras.
“I joined the police team searching along the track when the cops came to our residential area,” said a student of the Coimbatore Institute of Technology, whose campus shares a border with vacant plots and the GPT campus.
The search for the perpetrators
Seven police teams were formed to nab the perpetrators and examined footage from nearly 300 surveillance cameras. The breakthrough that helped crack the case was several clips showing the accused fleeing on foot after the crime. A moped left by the perpetrators near the abduction site was another key piece of evidence that helped locate the trio.
The Kovilpalayam police in Coimbatore Rural were looking for Kaleeswaran — who was identified during a gang-rape investigation — in connection with the theft of a moped a few days before the crime. Investigators also found that the trio, who stayed in Iruguru, about 4 km from the crime scene, had been meeting since the night of November 2.
A place at Vellakinar near Thudiyalur from where the police arrested the three accused | Photo credit: Special arrangement
Mr. Sundar said the accused were zeroed in on the basis of digital evidence, including CCTV footage, and were later traced to an abandoned place in Vellakinar, about 15 km from the crime scene, on November 3 around 10.45 pm. The police arrested them after they were shot in the legs when they attacked the head constable with a gun. The mobile phone of the deceased and her gold ring were recovered from the accused after the arrest.
Siblings and Historians
While siblings Karuppasamy and Kaleeswaran had been living in Coimbatore for about 10 years doing odd jobs, Guna started living with them only a few months ago.
Mr. Sundar said the siblings were history buffs who were implicated in a murder-for-profit case at Kinathukadavu in Coimbatore Rural in 2021. Kaleeswaran was a minor then. Karuppasamy was booked by the Thirumuruganpoondi police in Tiruppur in 2023 for allegedly robbing a woman of her five-sovereign gold chain.
Before their arrest in connection with the gang-rape, Karuppasamy was involved in four criminal cases and Kaleeswaran in seven, according to police records. In some cases, they were released on statutory bail after spending time in judicial custody.
The three accused were arrested for offenses under Sections 296 B, 118 (1), 324 (4), 140 (3) and 309 (4) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), based on the original complaint filed by a friend of the deceased. The police later added Section 70 (gang rape) of the BNS against them based on the survivor’s statement. The survivor, who is being counseled, and her boyfriend are in the hospital.
Karuppasamy and Guna sustained bullet injuries on both legs while Kaleeswaran sustained a bullet wound on one leg. They are undergoing treatment at Coimbatore Medical College Hospital in judicial custody. Mr. Sundar added that after the accused recovered from his injuries, a tentative identification would be made.
A police officer familiar with the investigation said the accused need to be interrogated in detail using digital evidence such as cell tower location data to verify whether they were visiting the crime scene for similar crimes.
An investigation team headed by a female inspector is racing against time to complete the investigation. Condemning the crime as “inhuman” and a “cruel crime”, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin ordered the police on November 4 to file a charge sheet within a month and ensure that the accused receive the maximum punishment.
Political resistance
The gang-rape incident also sparked widespread outrage against the ruling DMK. Apart from condemning the incident, opposition parties attacked the government and raised concerns about the safety of women in the state.
AIADMK General Secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami said the DMK government was compromising on women’s safety. “Is there even a police force in Tamil Nadu?” he asked in a post on X after the gang rape. In another post, he asked why officers couldn’t find the woman for four hours and 25 minutes.
BJP Tamil Nadu president Nainar Nagenthran and Coimbatore South MLA Vanathi Srinivasan criticized the Chief Minister for his governance which has “pushed Coimbatore far from the status of the safest place for women”.
Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) president Vijay, who questioned the government about women’s safety, said the gang-rape in Coimbatore took place when the trauma of the university student Anna was still fresh. He was referring to the December 2024 sexual assault of a Chennai University student.
Following the heinous crime, the city police has stepped up night patrols in all abandoned and vacant areas across its 20-post limits.
