POCSO court convicts 2 for raping 5-year-old girl in Delhi in 2013
| Date :19-Jan-2020 |
NEW DELHI :
A POCSO court convicted two men on Saturday for raping a five-year-old girl in east Delhi seven years ago, saying the case had shaken the collective conscience of the society. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court convicted Manoj Shah and Pradeep Kumar, and fixed January 30 for arguments on the quantum of sentence.
The gruesome incident at Gandhi Nagar in April 15, 2013, in which the convicts shoved objects in the victim’s private parts and abandoned her in Shah’s room believing she was dead, had happened four months after the Nirbhaya gang rape-and-murder case in December 2012. The child was rescued 40 hours later on April 17. In an over 100-page judgement, Additional Sessions Judge Naresh Kumar Malhotra said: “In our society, minor girls are worshipped as 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 said. It convicted the two 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. The offences entail a maximum punishment of life imprisonment.
The father of the victim expressed satisfaction on finally getting justice for his daughter. “Though the trial should have been completed in two years, we are happy we got justice after six years,” he said, hoping for death penalty for the convicts. “My wife is at home with my daughter.... She has almost forgotten the incident. We don’t want to make her remember the gruesome incident and the trauma that she had to go through. It is best she is not told anything about the case or the judgement,” he said.
Media persons attacked by convict outside court
NEW DELHI :
SOME mediapersons were attacked by one of the convicts rape case of a five-year-old girl. Manoj Shah, convicted by a POCSO court, hit a group of reporters when he was being taken out of the courtroom in which a senior woman journalist suffered injuries. The issue was brought to the notice of Additional Sessions Judge Naresh Kumar Malhotra, who asked the journalist to give a written complaint to police. The judge then sent her for medical examination where the doctor said she had bruises on her cheek. Following this, she registered a formal complaint with the police.