POCSO court hands death penalty to man for rape, murder of 9-year-old girl UP's Ghaziabad
A man was sentenced to death by a special court in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad after being convicted of the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl, police said on Wednesday.
According to DCP Rural Ghaziabad, Ravi Kumar, the Ghaziabad POCSO court sentenced the accused IPC sections 302, 363 and 376, six months after the case was registered for the rape and murder of a minor girl in August 2022, last year.
Giving details, the police officer said that the accused was arrested from a village in Modinagar area of Ghaziabad district after a 9-year-old girl hailing from the same village was found dead on August 18, 2022, last year.
The accused was tried and convicted by the fast-track special court and ultimately handed the death sentence for his gruesome crime, said the officer.
According to police reports at the time, the 25-year-old convict had lured the minor victim and her six-year-old cousin with ice cream to a nearby sugarcane field where he strangled her to death after brutally raping her.
Providing details about the case, special public prosecutor Sanjeev Bakharva said that the two kids were playing outside their home on August 18,2022, when they suddenly went missing and their family launched a search to locate them.
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Bhargava said the six-year-old was found lying unconscious in a sugarcane field in the village and upon regaining consciousness, the child narrated the ordeal of the cousins’ kidnapping by the convict.
However, the family still couldn’t locate the 9-year-old victim and ultimately filed a complaint against their neighbour who was taken into custody by the police and during interrogation confessed to raping and killing the child.
The convict also provided details about where he had dumped the child’s body leading the police to find her dead body in another sugarcane field.
The prosecutor said the police also recovered, the victim’s slippers and a fistful of hair, along with the cycle of the accused used in crime. All items were sent for forensic testing and the post mortem of the minor’s body confirmed that she was raped and killed, adding that the cause of death was given as strangulation, the court heard.
The forensic laboratory report revealed the hair in the victim’s palm belonged to the convict and a security camera footage showed the convict taking the two children to the fields on his cycle.
In a similar case, a POCSO court in Ghaziabad convicted a man of rape and murder of a six-year-old girl and sentenced him to death on February 9.
