A court in India’s Uttar Pradesh has sentenced a man to death for raping and murdering a three-year-old girl, terming it a “rarest of rare case”.
Sunil Kumar Nishad, 35, was arrested from eastern India’s Banda in June this year after he raped the minor in June and left her in a box inside a forest.
The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in the Indian state on Monday announced the sentence after finding Nishad, a trader and a farmer, guilty of murder, kidnapping, wrongful confinement and offences under the POCSO act which deals with sexual abuse of minors in India.
Officials and the child’s family said the child died during her treatment from injuries during sexual assault on 3 June.
Government counsel Kamal Singh Gautam said the court’s additional district judge Pradeep Kumar Mishra termed the case “rarest of the rare” and handed the death sentence to the man, reported Indian daily The Indian Express. The court has imposed a fine of Rs65,000 (£544.9) on the convict.
During the trial, the court recorded the statements of 11 prosecution witnesses and one defence witness.
During the questioning, he admitted to sexually assaulting the child and took the police investigators to the location where he had dumped the minor, the report added, citing police officials. He also strangled the child, prosecution said, adding that he believed the minor was dead.
Nishad then put the three-year-old girl in a box, rode with it on his bicycle and dumped her in the box a few kilometres away.
Police said the child was found unconscious inside a box with at least a dozen injuries on her body. She succumbed to the wounds on 12 June.
A DNA test of the accused man and the victim was conducted and the report showed a match between the samples, confirming the assault, said Mr Gautam.
The prosecution said the minor girl’s father filed a police complaint on the day his daughter went missing, accusing the man of luring the child on the pretext of giving her a toffee.
The father also said many people in the neighbourhood had seen Nishad with his daughter just before she went missing.
The accused was arrested during the police hunt which resulted in an encounter.
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