Mandsaur: Two months after an eight-year-old girl was raped in Mandsaur, a special court set up by the Madhya Pradesh government awarded death sentence to two men for the crime on Tuesday.
Special Judge Nisha Gupta held Irfan alias Bhaiyu (20) and Asif (24) guilty and sentenced them to death under the newly-introduced IPC section 376DB (punishment for rape of a woman under 12 years of age by one or more persons), public prosecutor BS Thakur said.
The court also handed ten years imprisonment to the duo on charges of abduction and life imprisonment on charges of murderous assault on the girl. The court took cognizance of the CCTV footage and forensic report. The prosecution had also produced 37 witnesses in the court.
Present in the crowd outside the court room, Vinay Duela, a Hindu Mahasabha office-bearer slapped one of the accused, Asif Mev, as the police were taking him away after the verdict was delivered.
The June 26 incident had brought back the chilling memories of 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape due to the sheer brutality inflicted on the minor girl.
According to the police, Irfan had lured the girl away while she was waiting for her father to pick her up from school. He took her to a deserted location, where he along with Asif, sexually assaulted her. They were caught on CCTV cameras outside the school.
The duo had also slit her throat and, assuming her to be dead, dumped her body in a vacant plot.
The doctors who treated the girl later said there were several bite marks on her body, her nose was badly injured and rectum was ruptured, indicating that an object had been inserted into her private parts.
They had to cut some nerves to perform three surgeries to save the girl and her condition is stable now, they added.
The case led to widespread protests in Mandsaur, with demonstrators taking to the streets over the dismal law-and-order situation in the state. They also forced shutdown of markets, schools and colleges, demanding that the accused be hanged at the earliest.
Unnerved with the backlash, the state government had formed an SIT under DSP Rakesh Mohan Shukla to probe the case.
Fringe elements in the town also had tried giving a communal colour to the brutal sexual assault on the girl, but chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had also come out to back the death sentence, saying the rapists were a “burden on the earth" and do not deserve to live.
Hailing the verdict, Home minister Bhupendra Singh claimed that such verdicts would instil a sense of security among women in the state.
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