30-year-old patient raped by guard, ward boy in Pune hospital

A 30-year-old speech impaired patient was raped by a ward boy and a watchman at Pune’s Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC)’s civic hospital in Bhosari. The survivor, an orphan, was at the hospital for treatment when the two accused - watchman Pramod Manohar Mandekar and ward boy Shailesh Jadhav - reportedly raped her in a lift on Thursday. While there was confusion over who raped the patient, a report in the Indian Express quotes a police official as saying that it was Mandrekar who raped the survivor. [caption id=“attachment_1077967” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The survivor is an orphan who currently resides in a home shelter. AP[/caption] Sub-Inspector of Bhosari Sanjay Kandalkar told reporters that the survivor lost her parents a few years ago and was currently residing in a shelter. “On 29 August night, at around 8.30 pm, Mandekar and Jadhav took the victim to the hospital lift on the pretext of shifting her. They opened the lift with the help of an extra key of the lift-door and allegedly committed the act,” he said. The survivor then reportedly went back to her ward and told the nurse that she wanted to return back to her shelter. Suspecting something was amiss, the nurse informed the shelter in-charge that the patient wanted to return but would not say why. “The survivor narrated the incident to the shelter home’s rehabilitation official on Saturday. The victim claimed she was raped by one of the arrested person and the other helped him. We took the help of a speech therapist as the victim has a speech problem and recorded her statement. Both staffers are in police custody and we are trying to find out who raped her,” Kandalkar said. A similar incident was reported earlier this year. In April, a 22-year-old mentally challenged woman was allegedly raped by a ward boy at a nursing home. The doctors who own the clinic were arrested on charges of trying to bribe the survivor’s family to hush up the matter. The incident had occurred at Walhekarwadi in Chinchwad town near Pune on 16 April in the nursing home run by Dr Vishal Sonawane (34) and his wife Dr Varsha (31) where the survivor was undergoing treatment.