Aluva market on Tuesday morning greeted visitors with sweets and fireworks. The celebrations started after the additional district sessions court for trying atrocities against women and children awarded capital punishment to Asafak Alam, the convict in the rape and murder of a five-year-old migrant girl, earlier in the day.
The market figured prominently in the dastardly crime since the police had found that the convict had raped and murdered the child in a deserted corner of the market frequented by miscreants during nights. The girl who had gone missing from her family’s rented apartment at Choornikkara near Aluva town was found dead covered in waste in the shrubby, abandoned spot in the Aluva market the next morning.
Everyone from headload workers, traders, and even customers took part in the celebrations. “He received the punishment he deserved after the brutality that he subjected that little child to. Completing the investigation and sentencing the person in 110 days will be a deterrent to the criminal-minded among both migrants and local people,” said Thajudheen V.A., a headload worker in the Aluva market for the past 13 years and the 13th witness in the case.
He had seen the convict along with the victim at the Aluva market shortly after she had gone missing on the evening of July 28. He had stopped him and asked who was the child with him. “He told me that she was his daughter. Since the child also seemed attached to him I had to let him go,” recalled Mr. Thajudheen.
Only the next day around 9 a.m. when he saw the television footage of the missing child along with the convict did it strike him. He immediately alerted the Aluva East police who rushed to the spot and recorded his statement. They also collected the CCTV footage from two shops in the market that had captured the convict and the victim.
