Verdict in Nirbhaya gang rape case

Verdict in Nirbhaya gang rape case tomorrow

Smriti Singh, TNN Sep 9, 2013, 03.56AM IST

NEW DELHI: Nine months after a 23-year-old paramedic student, Nirbhaya, was brutally gang-raped by six people — including a juvenile — in a moving bus, a fast track court is set to pronounce its verdict against four of them on Tuesday.

The case, which was put on a fast-track hearing, took seven months to conclude the trial and saw 130 effective hearings.


While the accused Ram Singh committed suicide in jail during the pendency of the trial and the proceedings against him have since been abated, the juvenile accused was recently sent to a reformatory home for three years by a Juvenile Justice Board after he was found to be "involved in the gang rape and murder" of Nirbhaya.

The court will now decide the fate of the remaining four accused — Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta.

As Nirbhaya succumbed to her injuries at a hospital in Singapore a fortnight after the incident, a charge of murder was also added against the accused. If convicted, the accused face a maximum punishment of death penalty.

In the seven months of trial, prosecution presented 85 prosecution witnesses to prove the charges of murder, attempt to murder, gang rape, unnatural offences, dacoity, destruction of evidence, conspiracy, among others, against the four accused. To counter the allegations of the prosecution, the accused brought in 17 defence witnesses in their favour.

According to the police, the six accused had allegedly gang-raped the girl in the moving bus after alluring her and her 28-year-old male friend. They both were also assaulted with an iron rod. The victim's friend, a software engineer, got a fracture during the scuffle.

During the trial, the prosecution had claimed that the accused were on the road in pursuance of a plan and targeted the victims, including the girl, in their "quest for sexual satisfaction and loot". Terming the case different from other criminal cases, the prosecution had said that the grievous injuries inflicted on the victim themselves explain the "brutality" and extreme torture.

Besides the dying declaration of the victim and the statement of the victim's male friend — the sole eye witness in the case — the police has produced evidence supported by the forensic reports to suggest that Nirbhaya was gang-raped in the same bus on the night of December 16, of which the CCTV footage was recovered. The police also claimed that the DNA linked the identity of each accused and also the identity of each object which was a part of the case.

The accused, however, claimed innocence and alleged that the police tutored the victim's male friend and falsely implicated the accused.