STATE OF HIMACHAL PRADESH Vs. MEHABOOB ALI

JUDGEMENT

(1.) FOR an offence, which is alleged to have been committed on 27th/28th July, 1998 the accused were put to trial. In terms of judgment dated 19.6.2001, passed by the learned Sessions Judge, Sirmaur District at Nahan, H.P., in Sessions Trial No. 16-ST/7 of 2000/1999, titled as State of Himachal Pradesh versus Mehaboob Ali and others, all the accused stand acquitted of the charged offence.

(2.) IT is the case of the prosecution that on 28.7.1998 Mehaboob Ali (Accused No. 1) asked the prosecutrix (PW-4) to contact marriage with him to which she refused. In the night intervening 27th/28th, July, 1998 at about 3.00 a.m. he went to the house of the prosecutrix, found her sleeping in the courtyard, woke her up and asked her to accompany him. Prosecutrix accompanied him up to a point where a scooter was parked and a man was standing. Thereafter all three of them went on the scooter to a point where maruti van bearing No. HP-17-5549 was parked. There accused Mehaboob Ali forcibly pushed the prosecutrix into the van and the driver started driving the vehicle towards Kulhal forest. On the way, vehicle was stopped near the jungle, prosecutrix taken into the jungle by "two persons" and forcibly subjected to sexual intercourse without her wishes. Before doing so, they broke the string of her salwar and gagged her mouth. Thereafter the remaining persons subjected her to rape, turn by turn. She became unconscious. In the morning she was taken in the van up to the Markanda Bridge. Whole day she was made to roam at different places in the company of "three persons". Sometime during the evening she was again taken back in the van to the same place where she had been raped earlier, where again she was subjected to forcible sexual intercourse by all the "six persons" present earlier, including accused Mehaboob Ali. The persons who subjected her to rape are the accused persons. Later on prosecutrix was made to alight from the van at "Do-sarka" from where she walked to the place of her relatives and narrated the whole incident to her mother, Sahida and Sitara.

(3.) ALL the accused were charged for having committed offences punishable under Sections 363, 366, 376 (2)(g) of the Indian Penal Code to which they did not plead guilty and claimed trial.