The owner and manager of a children's boarding school in western India have been arrested after five minors said they were raped, forced to watch pornographic films and act them out with one another, police and charity workers said.
If the children refused to comply, they were made to eat feces as a punishment, Reuters reported.
After the school in Karjat city in Maharashtra state was raided by police on Monday, the 52-year-old owner of the Chandraprabha Charitable Trust and his 30-year-old female manager were arrested.
"We received a police complaint from the Childline charity saying that one child had gone home for the holidays and confessed to his mother that abuses were happening," Karjat's Police Inspector R.R. Patil told the Thomson Reuters Foundation late on Thursday.
"Five children in total have now come forward and we have booked the two suspects under various offences," he said, adding that these included unnatural sex (sodomy), wrongful confinement and sexual assault.
About 28 underprivileged children, aged between 4 and 14, were accommodated by the school for 10 months of the year, Patil said. However, most of them were on holidays at the time of the raid.
Other children are being looked at for any signs of abuse, police said. More suspects are also being reviewed as well, according to Reuters.
Anuradha Sahasrabudhe of Childline, a charity supported by the government, said the children had spoken about all kinds of sexual and physical abuse.
"It's a horrific case. The children have been telling us about the sexual abuse going on there. There has been oral sex, there has been forced sex... These things have been photographed," Saharasabudhe told the NDTV news channel.
"Children have been punished by making them eat dog excreta and when they vomited, they were made to eat vomit," she added.
Although the residential school had been running since 2002, child welfare officials had failed to carry out government inspections since the school was not registered.
Child sexual abuse is disturbingly common in homes, schools, and residential care facilities in India, Reuters reported.
