Sao Paulo rally ahead of W/Cup broken up
Police in Brazil’s largest city Sao Paulo yesterday fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets to break up an antiWorld Cup protest hours ahead of the tournament’s opening match.
Dozens of protesters had gathered near a Sao Paulo subway station with a red banner reading “If we have no rights, there won’t be a Cup”, the AFP news agency reported yesterday.
The protesters were planning to march as close as possible to Corinthians Arena, the city’s World Cup stadium, but police forcefully broke them up before they could start.
The Reuters news agency quoting a local TV channel Globo News said at least one demonstrator was arrested about six hours before Brazil plays Croatia in the first match of the monthlong soccer tournament. Meanwhile, ground staff at Rio de Janeiro’s airports plan to stage a 24-hour partial strike yesterday. An Indian woman has alleged that she was gangraped by four officers at a police station in the state of Uttar Pradesh state, barely two weeks after two teenage girls were gang-raped and hanged from a tree in another area of the state.
The woman said she had gone to the station overnight in the state’s Hamirpur district to seek her husband’s release when she was attacked.
“At 11:30pm when there was no one in the room the sub-inspector took me to his room and raped me inside the police station,” the woman told local news channel CNNIBN.
The woman filed a complaint with a senior officer on Wednesday over the attack, which allegedly occurred when she refused to pay a bribe to secure the release of her husband.
“The procedure will be followed, the victim has filed a complaint and the guilty will be arrested soon,” Virendra Kumar Shekhar, a police official from Hamirpur, said.
Sub-inspector Balbir Singh said a criminal case had been lodged against four officers from the station.
The case is the latest in a string of horrific rapes and murders in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where its chief minister Akhilesh Yadav is under growing political pressure over his handling of law and order.
Late last month, two girls, aged 12 and 14, were gang-raped and lynched in their village.
They were attacked after going into a field to relieve themselves at night because they did not have a toilet at home.
Their families refused to cut the bodies down from the tree for hours in protest, saying police had failed to take action against the attackers because the girls were from a low caste.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday urged all politicians to work together to protect women, in his first comments on the issue since the hanging of the girls sparked public outrage.
Modi warned politicians against “politicising rape”, saying they were “playing with the dignity of women” in his first speech to parliament since sweeping to power at last month’s national elections.