US Woman Raped In India Update: Police Deny Bail For One Of Suspects Who Raped Tourist At Five-Star Hotel

At least one suspect has been denied bail following the arrest of four men for the April rape of an American tourist in New Delhi, India. Delhi’s Patiala House Court dismissed the plea for bail Wednesday, Asian News International reported.

The case made national headlines when the woman accused her tour guide and three other men of raping her inside her five-star hotel room. The unidentified woman returned to the U.S. before sending a formal complaint back to India saying that her tour guide handed her a water bottle spiked with drugs that sedated her before following her to her hotel room with the other men and raping her.

“The first two nights I was drugged, physically assaulted and sexually assaulted. I had no memory of what happened to me while I was in India,” she told a local television station. “I regained my memory three months later around the end of July and that’s when I took action.”

Upon questioning, the four men told officials they had been falsely accused. Each of the suspects was aged 20 to 24. On Dec. 26, police officially arrested the men.

Sexual violence against women is a persistent problem throughout India. In 2012, a young Indian woman died after being severely beaten and gang-raped on a bus in New Delhi. Following the brutal assault, President Pranab Mukherjee updated the country’s existing rape laws in 2013 to include life sentences and death sentences for anyone convicted of rape. The law also defined crimes like stalking and voyeurism as offenses for which bail is not an option.

Still, more than 34,000 cases of rape were reported in 2015 alone, along with 4,437 cases of attempted rape, according to a report by Al Jazeera. Experts noted that even those figures could be low due to the widespread stigma surrounding sexual violence in the country.