From correspondents in Warsaw
October 26, 2006 06:55am
Article from: Agence France-Presse
A SCHOOLGIRL in Gdansk, Poland killed herself after five boys stripped her in front of a classroom and simulated raping her.
The teacher of the class had left the room temporarily and one of the boys recorded the group's abuse of the 14-year-old girl on his mobile phone.
Some of the other girls in the class tried to help the girl, but she was only able to break free from the boys after they had stripped her.
The head teacher tried to relay the incident to the girl's parents, but only managed to get her teenage brother on the phone, who apparently did not pass on the message, police said.
"On Friday, when the teacher was out of the classroom, five boys undressed the girl in front of her classmates and then started to touch her intimate parts and simulated the sex act with her," said Jaroslaw Sykutera, a spokesman for the Gdansk police.
A preliminary investigation has shown that the victim of the attack told a friend on Friday night that she would never again set foot in the school.
On Saturday morning, the girl's parents found her lifeless body in her room. She had hanged herself with a skipping rope, police said.
The five boys who stripped the girl have been detained. The police tried to retrieve the mobile phone recording of the incident from the memory card of the phone, but the clip had already been erased.
The stiffest sentence the boys face would be time in a correctional institution for minors. Had they been adults, they could have been jailed for up to 12 years, according to the police.