New Delhi: The Pathankot District Sessions Court on Monday announced life-imprisonment for three of the convicts and five years of imprisonment to other three convicts in the Kathua Rape and murder case.
Convicts identified as Sanjhi Ram (prime accused), Deepak and Parvesh have been awarded life imprisonment. The verdict was announced on Monday after over a year of the gruesome incident.
The day-to-day trail of the appalling case commenced in the first week of June last year.
One of the eight accused had pleaded that he was a juvenile and requested a special court to take this into cognizance.
It is to be noted that the minor girl was brutalized in captivity and the barbaric nature of the crime prompted the society to demand the strictest punishment for the accused. Three of the accused were identified as Sanji Ram, Tilak Raj, Arvind Dutta.
A special police official, Deepak Khajuria was also convicted in the case. Sanji Ram's son has been acquitted due to lack of evidence.
The initial hearings of the case were held at a court in Punjab's Pathankot.
Later, the Supreme Court directed that the case be shifted out of Jammu and Kashmir after the lawyers in Kathua prevented the crime branch from filing the charge sheet.
The horrendous crime occurred in January 2018. Police had booked eight people under charges of murder and rape. One of the accused was the custodian of the temple where the incident had taken place.
The eight-year-old victim went missing on January 10, 2018. Following the incident, a missing complaint was lodged by the victim's family. Investigation revealed that victim had been sedated, held captive and gang-raped before being murdered. The incident had taken place at a temple in the Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir.
The post-mortem report claimed that the victim had been sedated. The victim was allegedly fed five tablets of Clonazepam. Gang-raped for four days, the victim was bludgeoned to death with a stone. According to forensic experts, the DNA of the accused matched with the vaginal swab of the victim. The hair strands recovered from the temple also matched with those of the victim.
While furious locals and citizens protested against the accused and stood in solidarity with the victim, some politicians decided to showcase their support to the accused. Two ministers of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Chowdhary Lal Singh and Chander Prakash Ganga participated in a rally which supported the accused. The two ministers were later sacked by the BJP.