TIRUCHY: A 51-year-old man was on Wednesday sentenced to 43 years of imprisonment for raping his teenage daughter. He was awarded three life sentences and one year of rigorous imprisonment, all of which would run consecutively, by the Mahila Court. According to public prosecutor G Krishnaveni Thamaraiselvan, this is the second most severe punishment under the POCSO Act in Tamil Nadu and the first in Tiruchy district. The highest punishment handed out was in Madurai, where an offender was awarded a 50- year jail term.
Speaking to Express, Krishnaveni said, “The accused is a daily wager and has a son and a daughter. An ex-convict, he returned to his home Tiruchy’s suburb after serving seven years in jail for murder. In June 2013, when his wife was at work, the man raped his 13-year-old daughter and threatened to murder her if she spoke about it to anyone. The girl, fearing for her life, kept mum and he repeatedly raped her on several occasions. Later, during a general medical check-up, she was found pregnant.
On December 31, 2014, she revealed to her mother that her father had been raping her.” Following a complaint by the mother, a case was registered in the local all-women police station and the man taken into custody. While the investigation was on, the minor delivered a baby girl at the Kasturi Bai Hospital in Dindigul on March 5, 2015.
The baby was taken to an orphanage trust run by the hospital, but died in June 2015. As part of the investigation, the police collected blood samples from the baby and conducted a DNA test. The results showed the accused was the biological father of the child. The Mahila Court judge pronounced him guilty under POCSO Act sections 5L, 5J (II), 5N and under IPC Section 506(I).
The court also imposed a fine of `3,500. Failure to pay the fine would add another three years to his sentence. The public prosecutor said since the incident included impregnation of a minor, the victim being his own daughter, the offender was handed out the stringent punishment. He has been lodged in the central prison in Tiruchy.