India News | Gandhi Nagar Gangrape Case: Delhi Police Urges HC to Enhance 20 Years Jail Term of Two Convicts

New Delhi, May 9 (PTI) The Delhi Police Monday urged the Delhi High Court to enhance the punishment of 20 years imprisonment awarded to two men for raping a five-year-old girl and shoving objects in her body here in 2013.

A bench of Justices Siddharth Mridul and Rajnish Bhatnagar said it would hear the plea on August 22.

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In the gruesome incident at Gandhi Nagar in East Delhi on April 15, 2013, the two convicts had raped and shoved objects in the minor victim's private parts and abandoned her in a room, believing she was dead. The child was rescued 40 hours later on April 17, 2013.

The trial court had in January 2020, convicted and sentenced Manoj Shah and Pradeep Kumar to 20 years in jail in the case.

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Shah has also approached the high court challenging his conviction and sentence.

Prosecutor Ashish Dutta, representing the State, submitted that the trial court awarded just 20 years of imprisonment to the two men which was not adequate considering the nature of the offence, and urged the high court to enhance the sentence.

The trial court had on January 18, 2020, convicted Shah and Kumar under sections 363 (kidnapping), 342 (wrongful confinement), 201 (disappearance of evidence), 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 376 (2) (gang rape), 377 (unnatural offence) and 34 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 6 (aggravated penetrative sexual assault) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

Shah and Kumar were arrested from Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga in Bihar on April 20 and April 22 in 2013, respectively.

The police had said some foreign materials — three pieces of a candle and one hair oil bottle — were taken out from the body of the victim, which was also proved by doctors during the recording of their statements in the court.

The girl had undergone multiple surgeries at the AIIMS in Delhi.

The incident had taken place four months after another gruesome gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedic student, who came to be known as Nirbhaya, on December 16, 2012.

While sentencing the two convicts, the trial court had said the minor girl experienced “exceptional depravity and extreme brutality” and awarded her a compensation of Rs 11 lakh.

In an over 100-page judgment, the court had said: “In our society, minor girls are worshipped as a goddess on certain occasions, but in the present case, the victim child, who was aged about five years at the time of the incident, had experienced exceptional depravity and extreme brutality.”

“The crime against the victim was committed in a most grotesque and revolting manner and the collective conscience of the community was shaken,” the court had said.

In 2014, Kumar moved the court claiming he was a juvenile at the time of his arrest.

The trial court took three years to decide his application for juvenility and transferred the case in April 2017 to the Juvenile Justice Board, which granted him bail.

Following this, the mother of the rape survivor moved the Delhi High Court against the trial court's order declaring Kumar to be a juvenile. The high court in 2018 declared that he was not a juvenile and sent him to trial before the sessions court.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)