Mumbai: 24-year-old transgender person sentenced to death for rape and murder of infant

While there were no eyewitnesses to the kidnapping of the child from her home in the middle of the night on July 8, 2021, the court based its judgment on circumstantial evidence, including testimonies of the family and two neighbours, who claimed to have seen the accused around 2 am carrying a “bundle” on his shoulder.

According to the grandmother of the child, on the day of the incident, the accused visited their home seeking gifts, including a saree, coconut and Rs 1,100 to bless the newborn child. The grandmother said that since it was the time of the Covid-19 lockdown, she expressed her inability to give any money. The grandmother said that the accused then threatened her that in the next 5-6 days, he will do something “which will make his name big”.

“The motive behind the commission of the offence was to create terror in a vicinity and become famous by his name so that no one should dare to refuse gifts to hims. There are grievous penetrative genital injuries found on the body of the victim, who was totally defenseless. Extreme brutality reflects from the act of the accused,” special POCSO judge Aditee Uday Kadam said.

According to submissions made by special public prosecutor R V Tiwari, on July 8, 2021, the victim infant was put to sleep by her mother around 9.30pm. The family had kept the door to their home open due to heat in the slum locality where they lived. The mother woke up around 1am and fed the baby. Around 3am, she woke up again when she found the child was missing. The family began looking in the locality and then approached police.

The next day, the family in their supplementary statement took the name of the accused, narrating the incident from the previous day, including the “threat”. Police questioned the accused and claimed that he led them to the spot in the evening of July 9, 2021, where the body of the infant was dumped. The police claimed that medical evidence showed that the child was raped, then dumped in a marshy area, to destroy evidence, where she drowned and died.

The court said that the case clearly comes in the category of “rarest of rare” and there is no ground to show leniency. “The accused committed murder of an infant who was only three months old and even her family had no previous enmity with him. There was absolutely no provocation on their part to instigate the accused to take the life of an infant and to commit such a gruesome offence with her…,” the court said.