Gang rape accused get legal help

"This is a critical, complicated case. All the more reason it should be tried in a fair manner," said Mr Sharma, who practises at the supreme court.

The case has shone a light on a widespread problem of violence against women but also the failure of the criminal justice system to bring the guilty to justice in a country where official statistics show a rape is reported every 20 minutes.

The case will be heard in a special fast-track process, set up after the attack, but some legal experts have warned that previous attempts to fast-track justice in India in some cases led to imperfect convictions that were later challenged.

Mr Anand said comments by the woman's male companion, who was badly beaten, about how they were left unattended afterwards and how the police wrangled over whose jurisdiction the crime had been committed in had exposed lapses in the investigation.

"This is not an open and shut case," Mr Anand said. He did not go into specifics.

The woman's friend told Zee television that passers-by left the pair lying unclothed and bleeding in the street while police officers argued over where to take them after they arrived 45 minutes later.

Police said the first police van reached the scene four minutes after it was called and took the man and the woman to hospital within 24 minutes.

The woman lived for two weeks after the attack but died in a Singapore hospital where she had been taken for treatment.

The decision to fly the victim for treatment in Singapore made little medical sense as the woman was so severely injured that her death was all but inevitable, doctors said earlier.

The government, on the back foot after furious street protests and stinging criticism of authorities over the rape, has struggled to defend its decision to send the victim overseas.

With a deadly infection seeping into her blood from damage done to her intestines during the assault, complicated by a cardiac arrest and damage to the brain, she was just clinging to life when she was flown 4,000km from New Delhi to Singapore late on December 26th, doctors said.

"It was ethically and morally wrong to have taken her out, given that she was sinking and her chances of survival were next to zero at that stage," said a doctor at New Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), which was advising the team treating the woman at a sister hospital across the street.

Reuters