A special court in Kochi on Monday sentenced to death a 29-year-old woman’s paramour, first accused in the case pertaining to the sexual abuse and murder of her four-year-old daughter over four years back. It also awarded double life imprisonment to the woman and another lover of her.
Ernakulam Additional District and Sessions Judge KT Nisar Ahamed had last week found the woman, Rani, her paramour and first accused Ranjith from Meenambara near Kolanchery and his friend Basil of Thiruvaniyoor, another lover of the woman, guilty of the murdering of her daughter, an lKG student.
The court awarded death sentence to Ranjith after it found him guilty under several sections of the Indian Penal Code and of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act. The judge had found Rani and Basil guilty under various sections of the IPC, Pocso Act and the Juvenile Justice Act.
The court slapped a fine of `50,000 on Ranjith and `20,000 each on the other two convicts. It was scheduled to pronounce the quantum of punishment for the three convicts on Friday but this was postponed to Monday after Ranjith allegedly tried to commit suicide by eating poison fruit Odalanga (Cerbera Odollam) in the prison on the night of January 10.
The murder had taken place at Rani’s rented house at Ambadimala, Chottanikkara, a few kilometers away from Kochi, on October 29, 2013. According to the Prosecution, Ranjith murdered the four-year-old child as she had become a burden on the illicit relationship between him and her mother. The murdered child was the eldest of Rani’s two daughters.
The woman’s husband Viond was in prison in connection with a narcotics case at the time of the incident. It is said that the illicit relationship between her and Ranjith had been going on for several years. Ranjith’s friend Basil, who was another lover of Rani, was staying at her rented house at Ambadimala pretending as her brother.
According to the Prosecution, Ranjith had tried to assault the child when she returned home from school on the evening of the day of the incident. When the child started to cry, he forced her to keep silent and then threw her on to the wall, the back of the child’s head struck on the wall leading to her death. Ranjith then hid the child’s body on the roof of the house.
The police has also found out that Rani and Basil were not at home during the incident. Though he tried to hide the matter from them when they came back, Ranjith was forced to tell them about the incident. They buried the body at an earth-mining site at nearby Arakkunnam as per her plan. It was Rani who told her lovers about what to do with the body.
The woman reached the Chottanikkara Police Station the following day to lodge a complaint saying that her daughter was missing. The police learned about the incident after they questioned Rani in detail following inconsistencies in her statements and the details of the crime came out after the interrogation of her two lovers.
The police learned that the child had suffered sexual abuses from Ranjith and Basil and that they used to physically assault her. The autopsy report had revealed that the child’s ribs and arm had been fractured in the attack by Ranjith. It also said that she had suffered deep wounds in the genitals.