Police Officers, Other Men Gang-Raped & Hanged Teen Sisters in India

"The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home."

Villagers sit in silent protest under the bodies of two teenage sisters hanging from a tree in India. Authorities in northern India have arrested four men, including two police officers, suspected of gang-raping and hanging the teenagers.

LUCKNOW, India — A group of men, including at least two police officers, raped and killed two teenage sisters in rural India then hung their bodies from a mango tree, authorities said Thursday, announcing the arrests of four men.

Villagers found the girls' bodies hanging from the tree Wednesday morning, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state, police Superintendent Atul Saxena said. The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.

Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree for the rest of Wednesday, silently protesting alleged police inaction in the case. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls' bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down from the tree until the suspects were arrested.

Katra is about 180 miles southwest of the state capital, Lucknow.

Police arrested the four men later in the day and were searching for three more suspects.

Autopsies confirmed the girls had been gang-raped and strangled before being hanged, Saxena said.

The villagers accused the chief of the local police station of ignoring a complaint by the girls' father Tuesday night that the girls were missing. The station chief has since been suspended.