Boyfriend of India Victim: 'She Tried to Save Me'

The 28-year-old boyfriend of the gang-rape victim in India has given his first interviews after the attack, and he says both he and his girlfriend tried and failed to fight off their six attackers:

• "We tried to resist them. Even my friend fought with them; she tried to save me," he tells Zee News, in a report picked up by the BBC.
• "She tried to dial the police control room number 100, but the accused snatched her mobile away."

The still-unidentified boyfriend suffered a fractured leg and other injuries, reports the AFP, which has an interview of its own. He recounts how they boarded a private bus with tinted windows outside a movie theater, even though he had his doubts. He quickly asked the driver to stop, but by then the assailants had locked the doors. In the interview, he criticized the initial police response as insensitive, along with what he called too-slow care at the public hospital that treated them.

• "What can I say? The cruelty I saw should not be seen ever. I tried to fight against the men, but later I begged them again and again to leave her."
• "I was not very confident about getting into the bus, but my friend was running late, so we got into it. This was the biggest mistake I made and after that everything went out of control."
• "They hit me with a small stick and dragged my friend to a seat near the driver's cabin." Then, the "driver and the other men raped my friend and hit her in the worst possible ways in the most private parts of her body."
• They were thrown from the bus after about an hour, and the boyfriend says some passersby did nothing to help.

(More New Delhi stories.)