Cops: 5-Year-Old Girl Is Raped on US Embassy Grounds

Officials at the US embassy in India are "deeply disturbed" by a new allegation—the rape of a 5-year-old girl on embassy grounds in New Delhi on Saturday, reports CBS News. Police have arrested a suspect, a 25-year-old man who lives in the area of the embassy compound that houses local embassy workers. He doesn't work at the embassy himself, but his father does, reports the BBC. Police say the victim, the daughter of a member of the housekeeping staff, is his neighbor, and he is accused of luring her to his residence using cell phone games before the assault. "The suspect didn't even expect that the girl would inform her parents or that anyone would approach the police," a police officer tells the Hindustan Times.

The girl told her mother, who went to authorities on Sunday; doctors confirmed the girl had been raped. The BBC notes that India introduced the death penalty for child rapists in 2018 thanks in part to a jarring stat—one out of four rape victims is a child. The assault also comes amid the backdrop of a succession of high-profile rape cases in recent years that have galvanized Indian activists calling for reform. (The assault of a young woman on a moving bus in 2012 made international headlines.)