Chandigarh, Aug 27 The Punjab and Haryana High Court has acquitted four men who were sentenced to death by a trial court in the alleged rape and murder of two minor sisters in Haryana's Sonipat in 2021, holding that the prosecution failed to establish their connection with the offences beyond reasonable doubt.
A division bench of justices Anoop Chitkara and Ramesh Chander Dimri on Wednesday set aside the convictions and sentences of Arun, Phool Chand, Dukhan and Ram Suhag and directed that they be released immediately, subject to furnishing personal bonds.
The case relates to the death of the two sisters, aged 13 and 12, in August 2021. Initially, their mother told doctors and police that the girls had been bitten by a snake. They were taken to a hospital in Delhi where one of them was declared brought dead and the other also died after a few hours.
However, three days later, on August 9, 2021, the mother submitted another complaint alleging that Arun, Phool Chand, Dukhan and Ram Suhag, who were neighbours, had entered their room, raped the girls and forcibly administered poison to them.
Following her complaint, a case was registered against the four.
In November 2023, the trial court in Sonepat awarded death sentence to all the four accused.
The court, however, found inconsistencies in the mother's successive versions.
Initially, she had named all the four accused in her complaint but when she recorded her statement under Section 164 of the CrPC on August 10, 2021, she stated that she knew the name of only one accused, not others.
The high court pointed out that the previous day's complaint had named all four accused by their full names.
"It is common sense that if the victims' mother had known the names of the accused on August 9, 2021, when she made a written complaint to police, there was no reason for her to explicitly state to the Judicial Magistrate (ACJM) the very next day that she did not know the names of any of the accused except one," the court said, observing it as "material contradiction".
During the trial, the woman turned hostile. She did not support the prosecution's case and denied everything, including the statement she made to the judicial magistrate.
The court found that medical evidence established that the two girls had been subjected to sexual assault.
The bench also found that the scientific evidence did not mention the detection of genetic material of any of the accused from the victims' vaginal swabs or the 'parna'.
"The absence of evidence creates a strong doubt about the involvement of any of the accused in the commission of rape," it observed.
The presence of semen on the parna (a thin, small cloth/towel) recovered pursuant to disclosure statements made by all the accused people is not proved, the court said, adding that the 'parna' is not a relevant piece of evidence for implicating any of the accused person.
The court observed that after careful analysis of the entire evidence and the record, the picture that emerges is hazy as to how these four persons were implicated, much worse given the death sentence.
"An analysis of the entire evidence not only creates doubt about the involvement of any of the accused but also indicates the absence of scientific evidence against them.
Given the above, although the prosecution is able to establish the commission of the offence of rape against both the victims, but it has failed to connect any of the accused as the perpetrator of rape," according to the order.
The prosecution failed to establish any legally admissible evidence connecting any of the four accused to the commission of any offence beyond a reasonable doubt, and they are therefore entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
Consequently, the convictions and sentences of all four appellants on all charges are set aside, and they are acquitted of all charges, as per the order.
There is no legally admissible evidence linking any of the accused to the commission of rape against any of the victims or to the murder of any of the victims by forcibly administering poison, said the court.
"Why would a mother who lost her two minor daughters, and why would two adult brothers who lost their two minor sisters, spare the real culprits? Ordinarily, these closest relatives, in utter grief, would be in a vengeful mood and thus support the prosecution to ensure the conviction of the real culprits and to seek the maximum punishment.
"All of them stating that the accused who were shown to them were not involved and would also create a possibility that the real culprits were never arraigned as accused, cannot be ruled out," read the order.
