3 sentenced to 20-year RI without remissions

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 6

Three convicts in a rape and murder case have escaped the gallows. More than four years after a nine-year-old girl was raped, murdered and dumped in Narnaul, the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Thursday commuted their death sentence to 20 years rigorous imprisonment without remissions.

Taking up the matter, the Division Bench of Justice Rajiv Sharma and Justice Gurvinder Singh Gill also directed the State of Haryana that inmates could not be kept in solitary confinement till they had availed all their legal remedies right up to the Supreme Court.

The details of the judgment were not yet available.

The matter had reached the High Court after a fast-track court in Narnaul had slapped death sentence on Ateli residents Deepak, Arun and Rajesh after finding the crime to be falling in the category of the rarest of rare cases.

A Railways engineer was, meanwhile, acquitted in the brutal gang rape and murder case. The incident dates back to October 31, 2014, when the victim went out of her house, but never returned.

Reports suggest the victim, a student of a primary school, had gone to leave a rat in the nearby area when she was targeted. A massive combing operation was launched after her mother informed the police about her missing daughter. The police found her body in the bushes on the morning of November 1, 2014. The postmortem examination confirmed that she was gang-raped before being murdered.

The same day the police registered a case under the provisions of the Indian Penal Code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, at the Ateli police station. The case was registered for offences, including kidnapping (363), procuration of a minor girl (366-A), murder (302) and gang-rape (376-D) of the IPC.

The incident had resulted in public outrage, with Ateli residents taking to the streets, demanding the arrest of the accused. The police, a few days later, rounded up four men in the case. The accused, in the age group of 20-30, were said to have confessed to committing the crime. A fast-track court, subsequently, held three out of four men guilty after examining the deposition of no less than 35 witnesses.