POLICE in Uttar Pradesh announced the arrest of four men, including two police officers, on suspicion of involvement in the gang rape and murder of two teenage cousins.

The girls, aged 14 and 15 and members of the Dalit community formerly demeaned as “untouchables,” had gone into the fields near their home in Katra village because there was no toilet in their home.

The men, possibly numbering seven, raped the girls, strangled them and then hung their bodies from a mango tree.

Hundreds of villagers gathered beneath the girls’ bodies as they swung in the wind, preventing authorities from taking them down from the tree until the suspects were arrested.

This angry protest was in response to the failure of the local police chief to respond to a complaint by the girls’ father when they went missing.

India tightened anti-rape laws last year, making gang rape punishable by the death penalty.

But that was opposed by the regionally dominant Samajwadi party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav.

“Boys will be boys. They make mistakes,” he said.