About 3 months after a toddler was raped and murdered in Ghaziabad, a special POCSO court on Wednesday sentenced the accused to death while delivering the verdict in record time.
The body of the 2.5-year-old minor girl was found dumped in the bushes near a road in Ghaziabad’s Kavi Nagar area. Twenty-nine days after the hearing began, the POCSO court sentenced the culprit the death.
Mahendra Srivastava, special POCSO court judge, gave the death sentence to a man named Chandan, who was a close friend of the victim’s father. Ten witnesses were produced before the court in order to prove Chandan guilty of the crime.
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Utkarsh Vats, who is a public prosecutor, said that the record time in which the verdict was pronounced is a landmark achievement, India Today reported.
The toddler’s family approached the Kavi Nagar police station on October 19 to report that their daughter had gone missing. After the family named Chandan as a suspect, the police interrogated him and took him in custody the same night. Chandan Pandey, however, kept denying having any knowledge about the girl, the victim’s mother said.
In the afternoon of the second day after the girl went missing, her body was found in the bushes on the side of a drain located in Kavi Nagar Industrial Area. Chandan then confessed to the crime and has since been lodged at the Dasna Jail on charges of murder and rape.