The person who raped and killed a four month old baby in Madhya Pradesh last month has been handed a death sentence by the court under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO).
The trial ended in 23 days.
Special public prosecutor Akram Sheikh had urged sessions court judge Varsha Verma to treat the case as the “rarest of the rare” and award capital punishment to the man.
On April 20, the girl was sleeping with her parents, who sell balloons for a living, on the street outside the Rajwada Fort in Indore. Naveen, who was known to the family, was also lying next to them. Early in the morning, he took the infant to the vacant basement of a building, some 50 metres from where they were sleeping, and raped her. As the baby kept crying, he killed her to shut up her.
The infant’s body was spotted hours later by a shopkeeper who had gone to the basement to open his shop. Her body had injury marks on her private parts and the head. The accused probably threw her to the ground, the police had said.
After the global outcry in reaction to the horrific rape and murder of the Muslim minor girl of Kathua, the Union Cabinet approved an ordinance to allow courts to award death penalty to those convicted of raping children up to 12 years of age.
As it was not applicable in JK, the state cabinet approved the ordinance within days which would allow courts to award death penalty to convicted child rapists.
