Two men who allegedly gangraped an American woman in Kerala’s Kollam district were taken into custody on Wednesday, August 2, by the local police. The incident occurred on July 31, when the 44-year-old woman, who was staying at an ashram nearby, was sitting alone at a beach in Kollam.

The two accused men saw her at the beach and approached her offering a cigarette. After she declined their offer, the men allegedly struck up a friendly conversation with her and offered her alcohol. Following this, she went into a slumber and the two men reportedly took her to a vacant house and raped her repeatedly. When she became conscious, she realised that she had been assaulted and informed the ashram authorities who reported the matter to the local police.

She then lodged a formal complaint on August 1, and the Karunagapally police took the two men –Nikhil and Jayan– into custody from the locality and recorded the arrest. An FIR has been registered in the matter under various Sections including 376D (gangrape) and 376(2)(n) (repeated rape on same woman) of the Indian Penal Code, and the police will produce the two before a local court later in the day. The woman had arrived in Kerala on July 22.

In another incident involving the rape of a foreign national, two men – Udayan and Umesh – were convicted to life imprisonment until natural death, by the Additional Sessions Court in Thiruvananthapuram in 2022. The convicts had raped and murdered a Latvian woman from Ireland in Kovalam in 2018, and her decomposed body was found a month after she went missing. The woman, along with her sister Ilze, had come to India and spent more than a month at an Ayurvedic centre in Thiruvananthapuram. The deceased was undergoing treatment for mental health issues.