Delhi High Court acquitted a man who was accused by his daughter of raping her, after a 17-year-old ordeal he went through. However, the acquittal of the man comes 10 months after his death. The man was convicted by the trial court and sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment.
The High Court on Wednesday said that neither the probe nor the trial was fair in the case. Justice RK Gauba also noted that the accused, from day one,“ had been crying foul”. However, the investigation agency and the trial court ignored.
The father had said that his daughter was abducted and seduced by a boy and the FIR of rape was lodged in 1996. As per the daughter, the father had been raping her for five years, starting from 1991, when the family was in Udhamppur, Jammu and Kashmir. The first incident according to her happened in 1991 when the mother had gone to her brother-in-law’s funeral.
Innocent falsely implicated
The then(1996) 16-year-old girl went missing, and the father lodged a missing complaint. Later when the girl was found, she was pregnant, and she then filed a complaint against her father accusing him of raping her. The court noted that the missing complaint by the father, an electrician in the Military Engineering Services was then closed without probe, as reported by Hindustan Times.
The girl in her complaint said that her father had been raping her between 1991 and 1996. She had alleged that her father raped her whenever she was alone. However, this narrative was rejected by the father, the mother and both her siblings.
The court said that nothing stopped the girl from telling this to her mother or siblings or other elders. The court also added that given that the girl was 12 in 1991 when according to her the assault on her started, the “consequent physical complications and pain would have been apparent, especially to the mother”.
The court said that the father’s appeal for a DNA test was disregarded. The court said, “This was neither a fair probe nor a fair trial. The boy was never brought in for DNA testing.” The father had additionally also produced his service record which indicated that when his wife was away in 1991, he was posted in the field while the family lived 40 km away and didn’t get any leave.
No probe against the boy who abducted the daughter
Reportedly, the boy in question was never questioned, neither was the DNA test carried out. This despite the mother testifying in the trial court that the girl had told her about being molested by the same boy a few days before her going missing.
The court said that there was probably a case of physical intimacy between the boy and the girl which should have been probed, but that did not happen. “The erroneous approach of the trial court has led to a serious miscarriage of justice in the present case unreasonably holding the biological father of raping his own daughter in the teeth of loaded circumstances showing her to be of wayward ways and possibly in liaison with a male acquaintance,” the court said.
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Also Read: Accused Of Rape At The Age Of 16 For Consensual Sex, 46-Yr-Old Man Finally Absolved Of Charges
