An Indian court has sentenced five men to death for the murder and rape of a teenage girl as well as the murder of her father and a child.
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The events took place in January 2021 when these men offered the young girl and her family – all members of a tribe in the state of Chhattisgarh (central) – to ride their motorcycles while they were waiting for a bus .
They first killed with batons the father who was trying to prevent the rape of his daughter, then his three-year-old niece, prosecutor Sunil Kumar Mishra told AFP.
A few days later, the teenager was found unconscious by villagers. She died while being transported to hospital.
Five men were found guilty of the rape and triple murder “and sentenced to death”, Sunil Kumar Mishra said on Thursday, the day after the court’s sentence was published.
-A sixth man “was convicted of criminal conspiracy, but his involvement in the rape was not proven, and he was therefore sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders,” he said. he added.
India rarely uses the death penalty.
This week, a Calcutta court sentenced to life in prison a man convicted of the rape and murder last August of a doctor in a hospital in the city, a crime that shocked this country where sexual violence attacks against women are very common.
This murder was reminiscent of that of a young woman on a bus in the capital New Delhi in 2012; and which also led to protests across the country for several weeks.
The four men found guilty of the gang rape of the student were executed by hanging in March 2020.
Indian police arrested 49 men in mid-January suspected of having, on several occasions and for years, sexually assaulted a teenage girl in the state of Kerala, in the south of the country.
Some 90 rapes were recorded every day in 2022 in the most populous country on the planet with its 1.4 billion inhabitants, but a large number of them would have gone unreported.
