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Thousands protested outside a police station in Hyderabad after the rape case
Indian police have shot dead four men suspected of raping and killing a young female vet in Hyderabad last week.
The men were in police detention and were taken back to the scene of the crime in the early hours of Friday.
The suspects were shot when they tried to steal the officers’ guns and escape, police told BBC Telugu.
The 27-year-old victim’s charred remains were discovered last Thursday – and the case sparked outrage and protests over alleged police inaction.
Prakash Singh, a retired police officer and a key architect of police reforms, told the BBC that the killings were “entirely avoidable”.
“Abundant caution should be taken when people in custody are being taken to the court or the scene of the crime,” he said.
“They should be secured, handcuffed and properly searched before they are taken out. All kinds of things can happen if the police are not careful.”
But Mr Singh said it was too early to say if the incident was an extrajudicial killing – known popularly in India as an “encounter killing”.
The police were heavily criticised after the murder – particularly when the victim’s family accused them of inaction for two hours.
Thousands of people protested at Hyderabad police station, insisting the killers face the death penalty.
Elsewhere in the country, there were other protests and vigils for the victim, who cannot be named under Indian law.
Cyberabad police commissioner VC Sajjanar told BBC Telugu’s Satish Balla that police took the accused to the scene to reconstruct the crime.
Two police officers were injured when the men tried to escape, he said.
Last week, three police officers were suspended when the victim’s family accused them of not acting quickly enough when the woman was reported missing.
Officers had suggested she may have eloped, relatives told the National Commission for Women, a government body.
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People in Delhi held a vigil on Saturday
The victim left home on her motorbike at about 18:00 local time (12:30 GMT) on Wednesday to go to a doctor’s appointment.
She called family later to say she had a flat tyre, and a lorry driver had offered to help. She said she was waiting near a toll plaza.
Efforts to contact her afterwards were unsuccessful, and her body was discovered under a flyover by a milkman on Thursday morning.
Rape and sexual violence against women have been in focus in India since the December 2012 gang-rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in the capital, Delhi.
But there has been no sign that crimes against women are abating.
According to government figures, police registered 33,658 cases of rape in India in 2017, an average of 92 rapes every day.
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