NEW DELHI: The condition of a 5-year-old girl who was raped, tortured and then left alone in a locked room for two days has improved, a doctor said, as protests continued in India’s capital over the authorities’ handling of the case.

The girl was in critical condition when she was transferred Thursday from a local hospital to the largest government-run hospital in the country. But D.K. Sharma, medical superintendent of the state-run hospital in New Delhi where the girl was being treated, said Sunday that she was responding well to treatment and that her condition had stabilized.

Police say the girl went missing April 15 and was found two days later by neighbors who heard her crying in a locked room in the same New Delhi building where she lives with her family. The girl was alone when she was found, having been left for dead by the man following the brutal attack, police say.

A 24-year-old man was arrested Saturday in the eastern state of Bihar, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from New Delhi. After being flown to New Delhi, he was in custody Sunday and was being questioned, police said.

The attack came four months after the fatal gang rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus sparked outrage across India about the treatment of women in the country.

For the second consecutive day, hundreds of people protested Sunday outside police headquarters in the capital, angry over allegations that police had ignored complaints by the girl’s parents that she was missing.

About 100 supporters of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party protested outside the home of the chief of the ruling Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, demanding that the government ensure the safety and security of women and girls in the city.

The protesters also demanded that the Delhi police chief be removed from office and that police officials accused of failing to act on the parents’ complaint be dismissed.

“Police and other officials that fail to do their jobs and instead engage in abusive behavior should know that they will be punished,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of New York-basedHuman Rights Watch, said.

Police said they detained more than 50 protesters when they tried to break down barricades on the road leading to Gandhi’s house. The protesters were released after a few hours.

Police also placed restrictions on the gathering of more than four people on the main avenue in the heart of New Delhi after university students said they planned to hold a demonstration there. Despite the police order, about 100 students gathered at New Delhi’s iconic India Gate monument and held a peaceful protest late Sunday.

Sexual crimes against women and children are reported every day in Indian newspapers, and women often complain about their sense of insecurity when they leave their homes.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for changes in attitudes toward women in India, where there has been a fierce debate since December’s fatal New Delhi gang rape about the routine mistreatment of females.

“The gruesome assault on the little girl a few days back reminds us once again of the need to work collectively to root out this sort of depravity from our society,” Singh said Sunday at a meeting with civil servants.

A day earlier, Singh had urged Indian society “to look within and work to root out the evil of rape and other such crimes from our midst.”

NEW DELHI (AP) — A 5-year-old girl was in serious condition Saturday after being raped and tortured by a man who held her in a locked room in India’s capital for two days, officials said.

The incident — which came four months after the fatal gang rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus caused outrage across India about the treatment of women in the country — sparked protests against the authorities’ handling of the case.

The girl went missing Monday and was found Wednesday by neighbors who heard her crying in a room in the same New Delhi building where she lives with her parents, said Delhi police officialDeepak Mishra. The girl was found alone locked in a room and left for dead, he said.

A 24-year-old man who lived in the room where the girl was found was arrested Saturday in Muzaffarpur town in Bihar state, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) east of New Delhi, Mishra said. The man was flown to New Delhi, where a magistrate ordered that he be held in police custody.

The girl suffered severe internal injuries, as well as cuts and bite marks on her face and torso, said D.K. Sharma, the medical superintendent of the government-run hospital in New Delhi where she was being treated. Sharma described the girl’s condition as “serious” and said doctors were trying to stabilize her condition.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people in New Delhi protested Saturday near the home minister’s residence and outside police headquarters demanding government action against the police for allegedly failing to immediately investigate after the girl was reported missing.

Rights activists and officials said the girl’s parents went to police Monday to report their daughter was missing, but that police refused to register a case. The parents are poor construction workers who had migrated to the city some years ago in search of work.

“The police did nothing. They did not register a complaint, the first step before they can begin investigations,” said Ranjana Kumari, a women’s rights activist and social scientist. “This heinous crime could have been prevented if police had begun investigations promptly.”

Police had no immediate comment on the accusations, but Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said Saturday that an inquiry had been ordered into the handling of the case.

The growing outrage against alleged police high-handedness in India led even the country’s normally reticent leader to react.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the police behavior “completely unacceptable.” He conveyed to Delhi authorities “the need for the strictest possible action to be taken against the erring officials,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement late Friday.

The fatal beating and gang rape of a young woman aboard a moving New Delhi bus in December sparked outrage and spurred the government to pass tough laws for crimes against women, including the death penalty for repeat offenders or for rape attacks that lead to the victim’s death.

NEW DELHI: The rape and murder of a young woman in New Delhi in December followed by two attacks on foreign female travelers has altered how tourists view India and led to a sharp fall in the numbers of foreign tourists, especially women, a study said.

In the three months since that attack, the number of foreigners traveling to India has dropped by 25 percent, according to the study by the New Delhi-based Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry. The number of women tourists has dropped by 35 percent, the study released late Sunday said.

The gang rape of the 23-year-old university student on a bus in the heart of the Indian capital shocked a country often inured to such sexual violence. It brought hundreds of thousands of angry citizens out in the streets to demand more safety for women and harsher laws to deter the perpetrators of such acts.

The study surveyed 1,200 tour operators from across the country who said that “concerns about the safety of female travelers” had impacted how foreign travelers viewed India.

Since the December gang rape there have been two widely publicized incidents where foreign female travelers have been attacked.

Last month a Swiss woman was gang raped in central India as she and her husband camped in a remote forest. In the second incident a young British woman says she was forced to jump out of the window of her hotel room to avoid a sexual attack in Agra, the city that is home to the Taj Mahal.

According to the study, the three incidents have hurt tourism and nearly 72 percent of the tour operators said cancellations of holiday bookings came mostly from women tourists, most of them from Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia.

The study said that travelers planning trips to India had instead opted for other Asian countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.

The winter months from November to March mark the peak tourist season in India.

According to India’s Tourism Ministry, 6.6 million foreign tourists visited India in 2012, earning the country $17.74 billion in foreign exchange.

Thirteen men were detained and questioned in connection with the attack, which occurred Friday night as the couple camped out in a forest after bicycling from the temple town of Orchha, local police officer R.K. Gurjar said.

The men beat the couple and gang-raped the woman, he said. They also stole the couple’s mobile phone, a laptop computer and 10,000 rupees ($185).

The woman was in a hospital Saturday in the nearby city of Gwalior, Gurjar said, adding that she and her husband apparently suffered no major injuries.

Police detained 13 men and questioned them in connection with the attack, he said. Six of the men were released after questioning. No other details were immediately available.

Indian television stations showed scores of police searching the forest where the attack occurred.

India has seen outrage and widespread protests against rape and attacks on women since December’s fatal gang-rape of a young woman in a moving bus in New Delhi, the capital. The crime horrified Indians and set off nationwide protests about India’s treatment of women and spurred the government to hurry through a new package of laws to protect them.

Scarlett Keeling was only 15 years old when her bruised and half-naked body was found on a beach in the Indian resort state of Goa in February 2008.

Two men were arrested and charged with homicide several weeks after the attack on the popular Anjuna beach in the coastal state which has long been a haunt for Western tourists.

But five years on, their trial has come to a standstill and the pair are out on bail in an echo of a wider malaise in the notoriously sluggish Indian justice system.

In an interview with AFP, Scarlett´s mother Fiona MacKeown expressed her exasperation at the delay, saying she will not be at peace until she has secured justice for the youngster.

“The system is just rubbish,” she said by phone from her home in the county of Devon on the west coast of England.

“It´s ridiculous that it´s now five years and we are still waiting.”

The delay is another embarrassing example of India´s failure to deliver timely justice for victims of sex assaults, with anger still smouldering over the deadly gang-rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in December.

Scarlett´s death also attracted international headlines, highlighting the dark side of a tourist destination still seen by many as a hangout for hippies.

Since the trial began in 2010 at the children´s court in Goa´s state capital Panaji, proceedings have hit numerous obstacles.

The court has not had a full-time judge since 2011 and the public prosecutor withdrew from the case two years ago saying he did not have enough time to devote to it.

Since 2012, the court has met just once a week as it struggles to clear a massive backlog of cases.

Police initially dismissed Scarlett´s death as an accident but opened a murder probe after MacKeown piled pressure on local authorities, pushing for a second autopsy which proved that she had been drugged and raped.

But the two defendants, Samson D´Souza and Placido Carvalho, were not charged with rape or murder after officers from India´s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said they lacked sufficient evidence to indict them.

Instead they were charged with culpable homicide, using force with “intent to outrage her modesty” and administering a drug with intent to harm.

Police allege that Scarlett was given a cocktail of illegal drugs and dumped unconscious in shallow water where she drowned, a theory MacKeown dismisses.

“I don´t believe for a minute that she was left to die,” she said.

“Someone was brutal with her and held her face down hard in the water to kill her.”

The family was on a six-month holiday to India when MacKeown and her other daughters went on an excursion to the southern state of Karnataka, leaving Scarlett in the care of a Goan family.

MacKeown came in for heavy criticism back home for leaving her daughter without parental supervision.

Victim of India´s “rape culture”

Five years on, MacKeown is back home in Devon, with her remaining children and her “happy, nurturing” daughter never far from her thoughts.

“She loved life, she had so many dreams. She wanted to study art, she wanted to play in a band,” she said.

“We miss her so much, she was my oldest girl and she was so good with her younger brothers and sisters.”

She buried her daughter´s body only six months ago, when it was finally returned to her by Indian authorities after a long bureaucratic wrangle.

MacKeown´s Goa-based lawyer, Vikram Varma, told AFP the ongoing Delhi gang-rape trial which is taking place in a fast-track court held important lessons for the rest of India´s police and judicial establishment.

“In Delhi, police arrested the culprits within days, not weeks. And the court has promised a verdict soon. So clearly when we set our minds to it, we can deliver justice within a reasonable time frame,” he said.

In Devon, MacKeown says she watched footage of the anti-rape protests in India with a sense of hope.

“I think it´s great that the younger generation is standing up and saying they have had enough. All women in India face the threat of this rape culture,” she said.

“My daughter was a victim of this too and it´s time to put a stop to it. I won´t be at peace until someone is punished for what they did to her.”