The Rape of Loura Jane Lambie in Kashmir

Born in 1966, 24 year old Miss Loura Jane Lambie, a Canadian agricultural science student, was on a stroll on October 11th on the boulevard in Srinagar when it was just getting towards darkness. Near the Centaur Hotel, she was having a chat with three local boys asking them about what was going on in Kashmir and was immediately waylaid by personnel of the Indian National Security Guards (MSG) traveling in a white Maruti van. They were armed with automatic weapons and carried radios. One of them, tall but slim, warned Loura not to get into conversation with local Muslim youth. “All of them are very, very dangerous terrorists and can molest you in this desolate spot”, he told her.

When the guards asked her who she was, she replied “a Canadian”. “You shall have to accompany us to the police station” and thus Loura was asked to board the vehicle. Instead of any police station, Loura was taken to the Oberoi palace hotel where the Indian guards had a drink, from their own bottles because the hotel bar was closed. She did not drink even though she was invited to do so. Then guards then ordered her to board the vehicle again as they told her it was not safe for her to go back to the house boat at that late hour, for the Kashmiri militants could kill her at any spot. The guards also took away her purse. Loura was then taken to a garden near Chasma Shahi. It was 1 am on October 12th.

One of the guards directed Loura to undress but she did not oblige. Her clothes were torn and she was laid down on the ground and gang raped. She cried under the open sky but there was no one to listen to her moans and shrieks except the sleeping state governor, Girish Saxena, in Raj Bavan, which is situated only a few hundred yards from the scene of the incident. For a change, Loura was taken to another adjacent garden and the gang rape by five guards continued until finally she fell unconscious.
A semi conscious Loura was then dropped on the roadside, at a slight distance from where she had been picked up the previous evening. On being sighted by the locals, she was carried to the police station a Nehru Park where a case for kidnapping and rape was registered under sections 366 and 367 of the Rambir Penal Code under First Information Report No: 90/40. The police officer at the station recommended a medical examination of the victim and Loura was taken to Lal Ded Women’s hospital in Srinagar.

Two female doctors examined her ascertaining that dead sperms were found in her uterus and the passage leading to it. There were scratches on her thighs, arms and breasts, which testify that she resisted.

Loura Jane Lambie told pressmen that very day how brutally the security guards raped her. The matter when brought to higher authorities in the state and also when it was taken up with the government of India by the Canadian high commission in New Delhi, the state police registered the case against the guards, arresting two of them whom Loura had identified in a batch of sixty four guards paraded before her. She recognized them even though both of them had shaven of their beards.

Loura was kept in protective custody by the state authorities and was allowed an interview with the state governor on October 13th who promised stern action would be taken against the guards turned rapists.

The authorities acted swiftly in view of the Canadian government taking serious notice of the incident and it was in record time that an inquiry was conducted and the culprits punished.

Here lies the difference between the rape of a foreigner and that of a Muslim Kashmiri woman. The latter is treated as an allegation and passed of unnoticed and unwept.”