NEW DELHI: Terming the acid attack on a 25-year-old woman not only a brutal human attack, but also a traumatising incident, the Delhi High Court has sentenced the two convicts to ten years of imprisonment for acid attack, which left the victim blind with mangled flesh.
Justice Sunita Gupta while doubling the sentence from five years to 10 years said, “The victim was a young girl with a pretty face and by one stroke the appellants made her face hideous and also made her blind in both eyes. By mere look at the faces (before and after the incident), it needs no great imagination to feel, not only her physical but also mental trauma. She cannot come out of the house and walk in the streets with blind eyes, nose, lips, forehead reduced to mangled flesh and thus, has become a prisoner in her own house, for a lifetime.”
“Keeping in totality of facts and circumstances, sentence of five years awarded to appellants (convicts), in my view, is on a very lower side, hence the same is enhanced to 10 years” the judge said and also directed Delhi State Legal Service Authority (DLSA) to appropriately compensate the victim.
“The very sight of the victim (who was present in the court at the time of hearing) is traumatising. If the court could be traumatised by the mere sight of injuries caused to the victim by the inhuman attack on her, what would be the situation of the victim, perhaps, cannot be judged,” the judge added. The verdict came on the appeal of the woman, who was a dancer at a hotel in south Delhi and was attacked in 2004.
“A young beautiful girl who has now to carry all along her entire life the hideous face, who has lost hopes forever of leading a normal life, including loss of a chance of marriage, the revered dream of every girl viz. motherhood, for no fault of hers,” Justice Gupta observed. The victim was working as a bar dancer in a hotel here and her colleague Simran, who was envious of her, had threatened to get acid thrown at her. On December 19, 2004, Simran's brother Raju splashed acid on her face. She received severe burns on her face and lost her eyes.
The trial court in 2011 had convicted them. The trial court had also imposed a fine of `1 lakh each on the convicts.