Kolhapur : A 78-year-old man was sentenced to death by a court in Sangli’s Vita on Tuesday for the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. He was also awarded rigorous imprisonment for life in two separate cases of rape involving minor girls.
Within months, in Jan 2018, an eight-year-old girl from the same area went missing.
Additional sessions judge R R Bhagwat handed down the verdict, holding that the convict had displayed “exceptional depravity and extreme brutality”. Witnesses told police they had seen the man washing blood-stained clothes. The death sentence will be subject to confirmation by the Bombay high court’s Kolhapur bench. The conviction in the murder case also emboldened the families of the two other minor survivors to approach police, leading to prosecution and life sentences in those cases as well. In a move that later shocked police, the elderly man actively participated in the search for the child. He even accompanied the victim’s grandfather to the police station to lodge the missing complaint. Eight months later, police arrested him. Police later found blood stains on a metal grain container where the clothes had allegedly been stored.
Praising the investigation, the court observed: “Small clue in the form of blood stains on metal grain container has helped the investigating agency reach the accused.”