A Delhi court has sentenced a 20-year-old bed roll boy on Brahmaputra Mail to five years’ rigorous imprisonment under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in an AC coach.
However, the court awarded him no punishment for molesting and wrongfully restraining the victim in the coach’s washroom under the Indian Penal Code, allowing his plea for a lenient punishment keeping in view his age, no past antecedents of crime and being the sole bread-earner of his family. The accused had got married during trial of the case.
Additional Sessions Judge P.K. Jain said awarded him the mandatory minimum sentence of five year imprisonment prescribed under the Act.
The girl along with her mother was travelling in a second class AC coach to Delhi on January 26, 2013. The accused, Vinod Kumar, had assaulted the girl, sleeping on a separate berth close her mother’s, in the early hours of the day. When the girl protested inappropriate touching of her body by the accused and tried unsuccessfully to wake up her mother, the boy came out of the compartment after being pushed by the victim.
Thereafter, the victim went to the washroom to relieve herself. The accused followed and restrained her and tried to convince her that she had been molested by a passenger travelling on the berth close to hers. He again touched her body inappropriately to show how the passenger had touched her when she was asleep.
However, the victim’s mother later caught him when she woke up on hearing the shouts of her daughter. Thereafter, the accused was handed over to the Delhi Police at the Old Delhi railway station when the train reached there.
