A Kerala court on Tuesday awarded death sentence to a 28-year-old migrant labourer from Bihar for brutally raping and murdering a 5-year-old girl at Aluva area in Ernakulam district of Kerala in July this year.
Earlier on November 4, Additional District and Sessions Judge K. Soman convicted Asafak Alam for the heinous crime.
The Ernakulam POCSO Court Judge pronounced the quantum of sentence today, on Children’s Day. Both the conviction and sentence were pronounced within 109 days of the incident.
The girl, also belonging to a migrant labourer family from Bihar, had gone missing on July 28, 2023.
As per the case, Alam abducted, raped and killed the five-year-old girl, who lived in the same building as him.
The body of the victim was discovered in a sack in a waste yard behind a local market in Aluva.
Police arrested Alam in a highly inebriated condition on the same day and booked him under various Sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The POCSO court, while noting that the case fell under the ‘rarest of the rare’ category, said that the convict did not deserve any sympathy.
Apart from circumstantial evidence, the court also took into account the DNA evidence and the seriousness of the nature of offence.
The Additional District and Sessions Judge had convicted Alam on November 4 for all 16 offences alleged against him, including aggravated penetrative sexual assault, murder, rape and destruction of evidence.
The trial in the case was completed within a record span of 26 days after filing of the charge sheet. Special Public Prosecutor G Mohanraj appeared for the prosecution.
The charges against Alam include Sections 302 (punishment for murder), 376 (2)(j) (rape on woman incapable of giving consent), 377 (unnatural offences), 328 (hurt by means of poison), 364 (kidnapping or abducting in order to murder), 366A (procuration of minor girl), 367 (kidnapping or abduction to subject person to grievous hurt, slavery, etc), 297 (indignity to human corpus), and 201 (disappearance of evidence) of IPC, and Section 5 of the POCSO Act.
(Case title: State of Kerala vs Asafak Alam)