A city court on Wednesday awarded death penalty to three youths for abduction, gang-rape and murder of a 19-year-old girl whose mutilated and decomposed body was recovered from a Haryana village in 2012.
“The convicts (Rahul, Ravi and Vinod) shall be hanged till death. The case falls under rarest of the rare category and life imprisonment would be highly inadequate as they are menace to the society,” announced Additional Sessions Judge Virender Bhat, following which the three convicts pleaded for mercy but the court did not pay any attention.
“The rape and murder of a girl in her teens are a distinct class of offences and cannot be equated to cases involving only rape or only murder. It is combination of two distinct heinous offences calling for capital punishment,” said the judge, adding, “The perpetrators of crime like rape and murder forfeit their right to live. life imprisonment is highly inadequate in these cases and there is no alternative but to impose death sentence. These criminals are a menace to the society and they don’t deserve to be kept alive.”
On February 13, the court had held the trio guilty of abduction, gang-rape and murder, and said they “gratified their sexual lust upon the deceased by subjecting her to rape one by one.” The three youths were arrested and booked for offences of kidnapping, unnatural sex, gang-rape and murder of a girl on intervening night of February 9 and 10, 2012. The court, however, had acquitted them of the charges of unnatural sex saying no such evidence was found against them.
The court also said that if any benefit is sought to be given to the convicts on the ground that they had no intention to kill the deceased but they did it out of fear of being identified, “it would amount to acknowledging that killing a girl after raping her is not a serious crime and this would encourage the rapists to kill their victims in order to escape being caught or identified.”
“Given the increase in cases of rape and murder throughout the country, I feel that time has come when the killing of the victim by the rapists, even if it is aimed at only to avoiding identification, should be viewed very seriously and the perpetrators should not be spared the gallows,” it said.
According to the prosecution, the girl, who was working in Gurgaon’s Cyber City, was abducted by the three in a car near her house in Qutub Vihar in Delhi and was gangraped and murdered by them on February 9, 2012. Additional Public Prosecutor Satwinder Kaur had told the court that the victim’s mutilated body was found, three days after the incident, at a field in Rodhai village in Haryana’s Rewari district. She had said the three youths had poured acid into the victim’s eyes and had inserted a broken liquor bottle into her private parts.
According to the prosecutor, Ravi and Rahul, who were residing in that area as tenants, were brothers and had planned to take revenge on the girl as she had rejected Ravi’s advances. The girl was dragged into a car by the three youths when she, along with three colleagues, was coming back from her Gurgaon office.