An American tourist was allegedly gang-raped by a truck driver and two of his accomplices in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, police said Tuesday.

"The 30-year-old was raped by men in a truck on Monday night. They offered her a lift and she accepted it," police inspector Abhimanyu Kumar told Agence France Presse.

Anti-rape protesters staged fresh rallies Sunday sparked by the brutal rape of an abducted five-year-old Indian girl in New Delhi, as doctors said the victim was showing signs of "improvement.”

A team of doctors at New Delhi's top government hospital are treating the child and officials said that she was in "stable condition".

The parents of an 18-month girl in India whose head has swollen to more than double its normal size reacted with joy on Monday after a top private hospital offered to fly her to New Delhi for tests.

Roona Begum, who suffers from hydrocephalus, a rare but treatable disorder that causes fluid to build up on the brain, was discovered last week living with her parents who are too poor to pay for treatment.

India's top court upheld the death penalty on Thursday for a mastermind of a series of bombings which killed 257 people in Mumbai in 1993, the deadliest set of attacks in the country's history.

Yakub Memon, brother of the alleged main plotter and fugitive Tiger Memon, was the only one of 11 convicts to see his death sentence upheld by the Supreme Court for his role in the blasts which wounded more than 800 people.

A probe into the death of a man suspected of gang-raping a student on a New Delhi bus last December blames jail officials for failing to monitor him adequately, an Indian media report said on Sunday.

Ram Singh, one of six men on trial over the deadly assault which sparked mass protests across India, was found dead in his cell in the high-security Tihar Jail on Monday morning where he had been held since his arrest after the crime.

Indian doctors conducted a post-mortem on Tuesday on the main accused in the New Delhi gang-rape case who was found dead in his jail cell after apparently committing suicide, medical sources said.

The death of 34-year-old Ram Singh in the maximum-security Tihar Jail on Monday led to accusations from his family and lawyers that he had been murdered, with the post-mortem set to determine the cause of death.

The main accused in the fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi last December was found dead in his prison cell Monday, prompting fury from the victim's family and accusations of murder.

Officials at the maximum-security Tihar Jail in the Indian capital said bus driver Ram Singh, 34, had hanged himself with a makeshift noose which he tied to a grille on the ceiling of his cell.

Two women have been kidnapped and gang-raped near Delhi, police told Agence France Presse on Thursday, in two separate incidents that highlighted the persistent risk of sexual assault in India.

In one case, three men abducted and attacked a 19-year-old woman, who hailed an auto rickshaw carrying two male passengers near a popular shopping center in Delhi's satellite city of Ghaziabad last weekend, a police official said.

Five men pleaded not guilty after being formally indicted Saturday in a special court on 13 charges, including rape and murder, in the fatal gang rape of a woman in a New Delhi bus, a lawyer said.

The men signed statements in the fast-track court saying they were innocent, said one of the men's lawyers. The lawyer cannot be identified under a gag order imposed by the court.

India's Supreme Court on Tuesday postponed a ruling on whether the trial of five suspects for the fatal gang-rape of a student on a New Delhi bus should be moved out of the capital, officials said.

Defence lawyer M.L. Sharma filed a petition on behalf of his client Mukesh Singh seeking the transfer of the case to ensure a fair trial.