New Delhi: More than four years after a five-year-old girl was brutally gang-raped in east Delhi, one of the accused has been declared a juvenile by a city court.
The court relied on a school document and ignored the ossification report submitted earlier that showed he was an adult.
The minor girl was raped just four months after Nirbhaya, in April 2013, and the case had drawn parallels. But unlike Nirbhaya, whose rapists were given the death sentence by the Supreme Court, her case has been marred by several delays.
During the pendency of the case, one of the accused had filed an application stating that he was a minor when the crime was committed. But an ossification test found that he was a major.
The accused then requested that he be allowed to produce a school certificate in the court to prove his age. “He filed an application to produce the school document to prove he was juvenile at the time of commision of crime,” said the minor girl’s uncle.
The court had asked the school’s head master to produce school records of the time when the accused took admission.
The head master produced the admission register, and in his statement he said he had “no requisite documents on record regarding the admission of the accused except the admission register.” Keeping in view the age stated on the admission register, the court declared that the accused was a juvenile in a hearing in the second week of April.
Talking to CNN News 18, the minor girl’s uncle said that it is very easy to produce a fake document as age proof and the court should have considered the ossification test report.
The family of the girl has now requested the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Shahdara district, (under whose jurisdiction the matter comes now) to appeal to the High court against the judgement of the trial court.
In the gruesome crime, the rapists had inserted candles and bottles into the private parts of the minor girl, who is now nine-years-old. She has undergone six surgeries, her family has shifted homes four times over six months and finally left Delhi to protect their privacy. Now, settled in Gurugram, the family has been running pillar to post to get justice.