The Madras High Court Bench here has reversed the acquittal of an autorickshaw driver from a case booked against him for having killed his second wife by setting her afire.
Allowing a State appeal, Justices A. Selvam and V.S. Ravi convicted the driver, M. Guna alias Gunasekaran, under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code and directed him to undergo imprisonment for life besides paying a fine of Rs.5,000.
The judges held that the Principal District and Sessions Court in Ramanathapuram district had erroneously acquitted the accused by relying upon frivolous and ignorable materials though Peraiyur police had clearly established his guilt.
Mr. Justice Selvam, the author of the judgement, said the convict, father of two children through his first wife, had married the victim illegally in a temple and was living with her in a separate house at North Street in Ramanathapuram.
However, when the victim became pregnant and refused to agree for abortion, he took her to a secluded place in his autorickshaw on April 16, 2008. There, he set the seven-month pregnant woman on fire after dousing her with petrol and ran away. The victim managed to put out the fire and ran naked to a nearby house where she was provided with clothes to wear and some gruel to drink. Later, she lodged a police complaint against the aggressor and got admitted to hospital where she died after three days.
The woman had mentioned the name of the accused along with his father’s name in the complaint, but she failed to do so when a Judicial Magistrate recorded a dying declaration at the hospital and told the judicial officer that it was her husband who set her on fire. Relying upon this discrepancy, the accused claimed that she was having an illicit intimacy with her sister’s husband whose name was also Guna alias Gunasekaran and that it was he whom she had referred to as husband in her dying declaration.
However, the Division Bench held that in a criminal case if the deceased victim also happened to be the complainant, then the complaint itself should be considered as a dying declaration under the Indian Evidence Act, after the victim’s death.
Since the complaint was very descriptive and refers to the name of the accused along with his father’s name, there could be no doubt that it was he murdered the pregnant woman, the judges said.
