A special court in Bareilly awarded death sentence to a man on Monday, guilty of raping and killing a 10-year-old Dalit girl in 2009.
The accused had also tried to hide the girl”s body in a haystack. The court termed it as a rarest of rare crime and awarded the accused death sentence.
The court convicted 32-year-old Ashok on as many as four different charges. One of the key witnesses was the girl”s seven-year-old brother.
He was also given life imprisonment and fined rupees 25,000 for violation of the SC/ST Atrocities Act.
Special public prosecutor, Manish Tyagi, said that the accused has been given death sentence, as it has been termed a rarest of rare case.
“The movement in Delhi, where people are demanding death sentence, when the girl is critical and they are pressing for death penalty, in case of rape. But, in our case, they raped a young girl and murdered her, so it came under the rarest of rare crimes, which is why the accused is awarded death sentence,” said Tyagi.
On May 27, 2009 morning, the girl, along with her younger brother Vivesh, went to the fields for grazing goats. At 10.30 am, both went to a tubewell, where Ashok was working.
There, Ashok caught the girl. A scared Vivesh ran to his house and informed his father Heera Lal, who is a labourer. When Heera Lal went to the site, Ashok told him that his daughter had left after drinking water. However, Heera Lal found the body of his daughter in the haystack in a room near the tubewell.
Recently, the barbaric beating, rape and physical assault of a woman on December 16 in the Capital New Delhi, fuelled massive protests across India with thousands hitting the central vistas of the Capital to express their ire and disgust with the government as well as with the feudal mindset of the society in general.
The victim of the December 16 attack in New Delhi is still in a critical condition on respiratory support, doctors said. (ANI)