seven-month-old-s-rape-rarest-of-rare-says-court

A Kolkata court on Tuesday sentenced a 34-year-old accused to death for sexually assaulting a seven-month-old girl child who was found crying on a central Kolkata pavement with injuries all over her body in December last year.

 

With Tuesday’s verdict, lower courts have handed down five death sentences since the RG Kar rape and murder case in August last year.

 

The court said in its verdict that it was persuaded by the electronic, scientific and digital evidence that the investigating agency had submitted during the trial. In the other four cases, the victims were minor and all of them were found dead.

 

"The court has reason enough to consider the sexual assault on the seven-month-old child as a rarest of rare crimes which attracts death sentence as punishment. The guilty person has no right to live in the society," the court observed in its verdict.

 

Police said the child of a pavement dweller couple was found barely 100 metre from the shanty where they used to live. “The parents lodged a missing complaint with the police and within three hours, the child was spotted. Our investigation revealed the suspect dropped the child on the pavement after committing the crime,” said a police officer.

 

Police then started examining the CCTV footages of the area and spotted the suspect. “Our sources identified him as Rajib Ghosal, who was frequent to the area where the incident took place. We rounded up him from Andal in East Burdwan district,” said a police officer.

 

The investigators used Gait Pattern Method to make the case watertight. Gait analysis is an assessment of the way the body moves. “Ghosal was taken to the spot and asked to walk. Forensic experts videographed his walk and matched it with the CCTV footage to ascertain the similarity in the walking pattern,” said Bibhas Chakrabarty, the public prosecutor.

 

The Kolkata police had submitted a chargesheet 26 days after arresting Ghosal,who hailed from Gopiballavpur in Jhargram district, 200 km from Kolkata.

 

In the RG Kar rape and murder case, the CBI court in Kolkata, however, did not find the crime fit for the rarest of rare crimes category and sentenced the lone accused Sanjay Roy, a former civic volunteer of Kolkata police, to life imprisonment.