New Delhi: The three former students of OP Jindal Global University in Sonepat were sentenced on May 24 after they were found guilty of gang rape and blackmailing a junior management student for about two years.
The WhatsApp conversations between a rape victim and the accused students proved crucial evidence for their conviction by a trial court. The documents were made available on Monday.
The convicts were already in jail since April 2015 when they were first accused by the girl of rape since she joined the university in August 2013.
The main accuse Hardik Sikri and his friend Karan Chhabra were sentenced to 20 years each, the third accomplice Vikas Garg, was sentenced seven years jail term.
The Additional Sessions Judge (ASJ), Sunita Grover said while passing the judgement that.”The WhatsApp chats running into pages is so abusive and vulgar that the extracts of the same cannot be explained and put into the judgment and what only can be concluded through the WhatsApp chat is that the prosecutrix (victim) was totally under control and dominance of the accused, Hardik.”
According to the complaint, Hardik had circulated her nude pictures among his friends through WhatsApp. He had stored the pictures in a web storage platform – Apple’s I-cloud and threatened to make them public on the university’s website.
The judge also found him guilty of circulating obscene material. The judge said the messages proved the victim was under “stress” and “duress” to keep sharing more nude pictures with Sikri.
The judge rejected the defence argument that the girl’s consent was involved. The girl’s legal advisor, Advocate Prashant Mediratta, upheld the verdict as perhaps the first of its kind owing to the role electronic data played in it.
He said to Hindustan Times that.” The court accepted the evidence because it was original and taken from the girl’s cellphone directly”.