Staff Reporter
ITANAGAR, 4 Sep: The court of the special judge (POCSO) in Lohit HQ Tezu has sentenced one Aka Kalung to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment (RI) for raping a minor.
Judge Lobsang Tenzin convicted Kalung under Section 376 (2) (f) IPC and Section 4 (1) of the POCSO Act, 2012, and sentenced him as per Section 42 of the POCSO Act, 2012.
Kalung, an employee of the Lohit KVK, was sentenced to undergo rigorous imprisonment for 10 years and to pay a fine of Rs 20,000. In default, the convict shall undergo simple imprisonment of two months.
The court has also recommended payment of monetary compensation to the victim girl under the Arunachal Pradesh Victim Compensation Scheme, 2011.
The FIR was registered on 22 March, 2021, while the final verdict was given on 30 August, 2022.
The special public persecutor for the POCSO case was Tapak Uli.
The minor had been brought to Roing from Nepal when she was very little. She served as a domestic help for Kalung and his family. She said that she was sexually abused since the beginning and had been repeatedly raped over many years.
As reported earlier, Kalung had fled from Roing after learning that the girl had made rape allegations against him. He managed to get an interim bail from the high court even before the registration of the case.
The case attracted the attention of the then chief justice of the Gauhati High Court, Sudhanshu Dhulia, who took suo moto cognisance after it emerged that the sessions court in Tezu had granted custody of the minor to a relative of the rapist.
According to the government’s senior additional advocate’s letter to the chief secretary, the commissioners of WCD and law, the director of health services, and the DGP, the case was taken up by the court based on a report headlined ‘Rape victim subjected to harassment, court hands over victim to alleged rapist’s relatives’, which was published in this daily.
The sessions court in Tezu had earlier ordered that the victim be handed over to one Pinky Debnath, who was identified as her local guardian. Ironically, Debnath is the sister-in-law of Kalung.
Earlier, the minor was made to record her statement alone before the magistrate, who was a friend of the accused.
In its 30 August sentence, the judge wrote that “the victim stated that the learned magistrate who recorded her statement under Section 164 CrPC was a friend of the accused person and he visited the house of the accused and he knew her. This court is not casting any aspersion on the learned magistrate as he was not summoned as witness in this case. However, the record shows that the learned magistrate did not provide any support person to remain present with the victim at the time of recording her statement under Section 164 (5A) (a) CrPC, read with Section 25 of POCSO Act, 2012.”
