A Delhi court on Thursday, 30 January, sentenced two men to 20 years in jail in the kidnapping and gang-rape case of a five-year-old girl in East Delhi in 2013.
The court has also directed the convicts to pay Rs 11 lakh as compensation to the victim.
The convicts, Manoj Shah and Pradeep Kumar, were facing trial for raping the girl at a rented accommodation in East Delhi’s Gandhi Nagar area in April 2013.
They were convicted on 18 January in the case, with the judge saying that the child experienced exceptional depravity and extreme brutality.
In the gruesome incident at Gandhi Nagar on 15 April 2013, the convicts had shoved objects in the victim's private parts and abandoned her in a room, believing she was dead.
The child was rescued 40 hours later on 17 April. In an over 100-page judgment, the court had said: "In our society, minor girls are worshipped as a goddess on certain occasions, but in the present case, the victim child, who was aged about five years at time of incident, had experienced exceptional depravity and extreme brutality."
“The crime against the victim was committed in a most grotesque and revolting manner and the collective conscience of the community was shaken,” the court had said.
The incident had taken place four months after another gruesome gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedic student, who came to be known as Nirbhaya.
Charges Against the Convicts
The court had convicted Shah and Kumar under sections 363 (kidnapping), 342 (wrongful confinement), 201 (disappearance of evidence), 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 376 (2) (gang rape), 377 (unnatural offence) and 34 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 6 (aggravated penetrative sexual assault) of the POCSO Act.
Shah and Kumar were arrested from Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga in Bihar on 20 April and 22 April in 2013, respectively.
The police had said some foreign materials – three pieces of a candle and one hair oil bottle – were taken out from the body of the victim, which was also proved by doctors during recording of their statements in the court. The girl had undergone multiple surgeries at the AIIMS in Delhi.
(With inputs from PTI)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)