Four found guilty of Delhi gang-rape She was gang-raped, mutilated with an iron rod and then thrown from the bus and left for dead. Such were the extent of her injuries, she was flown to a specialist hospital in Singapore, only to die 13 days after the attack. The nature of the assault and her catastrophic injuries, which were reported in rare detail on Indian television stations, caused a wave of anger throughout the country over the rising number of rapes and the tolerance of violent assaults on women. The scale of public anger also reflected the contrast between the victim and her attackers and the different aspects of India they represented. She was a poor, hard-working but ambitious lower-middle class A-student, who had learned English, worked in a call centre and was striving to help her financially-pressed family. She was modestly dressed and accompanied by a man. Her rapists and murderers were drunk slum-dwellers and petty criminals hooked on cheap mobile phone porn clips with little hope of a better life. Their prosecutors had told the court they had met on December 16 in the Ravidass Camp shanty village, a tangle of tin-roofed, temporary shacks largely inhabited by migrants, and following a heavy drinking session had set out to "pick up a female passenger to have sex with and make merry." According to the police, the leader of the gang, Ram Singh, 32, who was later found dead in jail, had told them they had also intended to kill their victim so that their crimes would "not come to light." Singh, his brother Mukesh, 26, their fellow slum-dwellers Vinay Sharma, 20, Pawan Kumar, 19, Akshay Kumar, 28 and the juvenile identified as "Raju," found their victim at Munirka, in South Delhi, where she and her friend had just been dropped by a rickshaw driver who refused to take them all the way to her home in Dwarka, a further half hour's drive away. At 9.15pm on Sunday December 16, they were ushered onto a private bus by the juvenile assailant, where they were first abused by members of the gang who asked her why she was out with a man who was not her husband, and then punched and kicked before she was taken to the back of the bus where she was raped in turn by all six men and beaten with an iron rod, police said. The injuries inflicted by the rod led to her death. Inspector Anil Sharma, who led the police investigation, described in a statement how the men had tore at her body and used the rod to try to kill her. The relentless assault began at 9.24 pm and continued for 30 minutes until 9.54 pm when she was dragged by her hair and thrown naked from the bus along with her friend at the Mahipalpur flyover, close to the airport where her father worked as a baggage handler. There had been some concerns that the men would not be able to get a fair trial because public anger and presumption of their guilt had been so widespread that even lawyers from the local Bar Association refused to act for them. Those who volunteered failed to turn up for several hearings and were dismissed as under-achievers seeking publicity. The father of Ram And Mukesh Singh, Mangi Lal, said he would appeal against the verdict in the High Court. A.K Singh, advocate for the other three perpetrators Akshay Kumar, Vinay Sharma and Pawan Kumar, said his clients had been falsely convicted under public and government pressure for them to be hanged regardless of guilt. "We're definitely going to appeal," he said. It's injustice. My first son was killed in jail and the other one has fraudulently been held guilty, " he said he his weeping wife threw herself at te feet of their son's lawyer and begged him to "get our son home." The court took just eight months to hear the case and deliver its verdict - one of the fastest in history. Most rape cases in India take between six to eight years to reach court.Altamas Kabir, India's chief justice when the trial began, said such delays had created a culture of impunity in which rapists and other criminals believed they would not be convicted for their crimes. There are currently an estimated 90,000 rape cases pensing in India's courts, but the conviction rate is below four per cent.