CHENNAI: Four years after a 40-year-old woman was waylaid and gang-raped near Thelliyar Agaram in Porur, the Tiruvallur principal sessions court sentenced six men to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment each on Saturday.
Five of them also received life imprisonment under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Principal Sessions Judge Dr J J Juliet Pushpa convicted Surya @ Suryaprakash (25), Karuppaiah @ Kutty (31), Dinesh (31), Ganesh (22), Santhosh @ Santhoshkumar (27), and Subash (23).
All six were held guilty of gang rape under IPC section 376(D), dacoity, abduction and criminal intimidation, and handed 10 years of RI each under the dacoity and abduction counts.
The life term under the SC/ST Act was imposed on five of them — Karuppaiah, was not booked under the provision because he belongs to a Scheduled Caste. The court ordered the sentences to run concurrently and recommended `5 lakh as compensation to the survivor.
According to the prosecution, the woman, who runs a tea shop near Porur tollgate, was returning home late on the night of August 6, 2022. Around 11:30 pm, near a ration shop at Thelliyar Agaram, the men waylaid the car, assaulted the driver, pushed him out, then took her to a vacant ground, robbed her of her gold jewellery and raped her. After the driver alerted a police patrol, one of the accused was caught at the scene and the other five were arrested days later.
Rejecting the defence’s plea that the absence of genital injuries and DNA evidence disproved rape, the judge held that the survivor’s sole, consistent testimony was enough to convict, and that in a gang-rape all the accused share the liability even if only one commits the act.