New Delhi: An accused in the 2018 gang-rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua, who was declared an adult by the Supreme Court in November last year, has been formally chargesheeted.
The crime branch of the J&K Police has filed the charges.
PTI has reported that police has invoked various sections against Shubam Sangra, including those related to murder, rape, kidnapping and wrongful confinement, and submitted the chargsheet with the Chief Judicial Magistrate at the sessions court on Kathua. The next date of hearing in the case is January 24.
The trial will take place in Pathankot in bordering Punjab. The Supreme Court on May 7, 2018, had transferred the trial of the case from Kathua to Pathankot and ordered a day-to-day trial after some lawyers prevented the crime branch officials from filing a chargesheet.
The case in which a child had been kidnapped, gang-raped for four days and then killed had led to nationwide outrage in 2018. The child belonged to the Bakerwal nomadic tribe.
A total of eight people where held accused in the case. Sangra was instrumental in the kidnapping, rape and killing of the child, police said.
It was Sangra’s multiple petitions in various courts and a shoddy application for a birth certificate that led to the unravelling of a conspiracy to proclaim him as a juvenile, it has been reported.
“It is held that the respondent accused was not a juvenile at the time of the commission of the offence and should be tried the way other co-accused were tried in accordance with the law,” Justice Pardiwala, of the Supreme Court bench, had said in November, while pronouncing the judgment.
A special court on June 10, 2019 sentenced three men to life imprisonment till their last breath for the ghastly crime.
Sanji Ram, the mastermind and caretaker of the temple where the crime took place; Deepak Khajuria, a special police officer, and Parvesh Kumar, a civilian – the three main accused – were spared the death penalty, a punishment sought by the prosecution during the year-long in-camera trial in the court.
The other three accused – sub-inspector Anand Dutta, head constable Tilak Raj and special police officer Surender Verma – were convicted for destruction of evidence to cover up the crime and handed down five years in jail and a Rs 50,000 fine each.