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Assam: Minor boy gets 7-year imprisonment for raping, killing 6-year-old girl
The convicted minor boy from Assam’s Hailakandi district will be sent to a shelter home and he will be sent to jail once he becomes an adult
A special court in Assam’s Hailakandi district on Monday sentenced a minor boy to seven years of imprisonment for raping and murdering a six-year-old girl in February, 2022.
As per the records of the case, registered in Hailakandi’s Ramnathpur Police Station in February 2022, the six-year-old girl went missing on February 9, 2022 and her dead body was recovered a day later. A boy, aged 15, from the locality was detained and he confessed his crime, according to the police.
On February 14, the accused juvenile was arrested under Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 and police later arrested his father for trying to destroy evidence.
Special judge Sanjoy Hazarika on Monday pronounced the sentence under sections 302 (murder), 201 (destroying evidence of a crime) and 363 (kidnapping) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, after hearing 29 witnesses.
Special public prosecutor Monika Deb and Khalil Uddin Laskar represented the victim in the court, while the accused was represented by Joynul Hussain Choudhury and Hussain Ahmed Choudhury.
“During interrogation, the minor boy confessed to the crime and narrated the entire incident of rape and subsequent murder, which was recorded,” Deb said.
Deb said that the special court conducted the process in a fast-track manner. It examined the evidence collected by police, the postmortem report of the girl and statements of the witnesses before coming to a conclusion.
“After examining all the aspects, the court started hearing arguments and pronounced the sentence on January 29. The convict will be sent to a shelter home, he’ll be sent to jail once he becomes an adult,” Deb said.
After the incident happened in 2022, a team of Assam State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (ACPCR) visited Hailakandi to take part in the investigation and interrogation since many children were involved in it.
Member of ACPCR, Ajoy Kumar Dutta said that they talked the to family members and kids separately. There were police officials without uniforms during the interrogation.
“We found a family behaving strangely and there were too many relatives in that house which helped us to find the way to identify the criminal,” Dutta told HT on February 14, 2022.
