A 56-year-old man was sentenced to death by a Delhi fast track court for raping and killing a minor two years ago.
Additional Sessions Judge Virender Bhat, one of the six judges who head fast track courts that hear cases related to sexual offences, gave capital punishment for murder under section 302 to the accused, Bharat Singh on Tuesday, reported The Times of India.
Saying that the gruesome crime was among the "rarest of rare" cases, the court said, "There cannot be anything worse than this that a man can do while raping a minor. He did not heed the cries of the minor victim during the commission of the offence. It was a ghastly and heinous crime and the convict opted to do it in such a brutal manner that her internal organs were pulled out."
Besides the death penalty, Singh was also given life sentence for rape under (section 376) and fined ₹1 lakh.
The prosecution said that the offence took place on April 10, 2011 when the three-year-old girl was playing outside her house at Kapashera on the outskirts of Delhi and couldn't find her way home. She reached a farmhouse, where Bharat Singh worked there as a guard. After taking the girl inside, Singh raped and eventually killed her.
He later threw her body in an isolated place and immediately fled from the farmhouse.
The victim's father, a richshaw puller, lodged a missing complaint and days later the girl's body was recovered from the bushes near the farmhouse.
Pushing aside the defence argument that Singh didn't intentionally mean to kill the girl, Judge Virender Bhat said that people like Singh were a "menace to the society" and deserved no leniency.
The medical evidence presented in court showed that the girl died from rape-related injuries.
The death penalty verdict came ten days after the Delhi government set up fast track courts on Jan 5 to deal with cases on sexual crimes. The setting up of these courts was issued following the nationwide protests demanding enhanced safety and security for women in the wake of the gang-rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student last month.
