Odisha court awards 35 year jail term to gang-rape convicts

Cuttack: In a historic judgement, Orissa High Court today awarded 35 year imprisonment to two gang-rape convicts after upturning the lower court judgement.

The court pronounced the quantum of punishment today and sentenced Marsha Munda and Jiten Munda in the sensational Bindhya Mahakud gangrape and murder case. The court also acquitted three others for want of evidence.

The convicts had challenged the ADJ, Champua verdict which had pronounced death sentence to the five on November 11, 2015.

The High Court here, however, upturned the verdict and jailed them to 35 years.

Worth mentioning, this is the highest sentence any court in the state has ever awarded.

The Class VIII girl Bindhya (13) from Barbil area in Keonjhar district was kidnapped by motorcycle-borne miscreants on August 1, 2012 while she was returning from tuition classes. She was forcibly taken to a nearby forest where the youths gang-raped her and later mercilessly murdered fearing disclosure of their identity.

Local police arrested five persons in this connection and had forwarded them to court.