A man in West Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district has been sentenced to death by a special POCSO court for the rape and murder of a minor girl. The court deemed the case as the ‘rarest of rare’ due to the victim’s age being similar to the accused’s daughter. The court has also directed the district legal services authority to provide Rs 5 lakh in compensation to the victim’s family. The 11-year-old girl was abducted from her home and subsequently raped and murdered on September 29, 2023. The girl’s uncle reported her missing, and her body was later discovered near a river. A postmortem confirmed rape and strangulation as the cause of death. In a separate legal matter, the Supreme Court granted bail to a man from Uttarakhand accused of religious conversion and cheating, citing the couple’s parents’ consent to their marriage.
