After a long wait of 28 years, a rape survivor in Uttar Pradesh’s Shahjahanpur has finally seen justice, primarily due to the efforts of her son, who was born out of the rape.

Uttar Pradesh police apprehended and sent one of the rapists identified as Mohammad Razi alias Guddu Hasan to jail on Tuesday (August 2). Efforts are being made to apprehend the second accused, Naqi Hassan, who has been traced somewhere in Odisha.

According to reports, the police arrested Mohammad Razi alias Guddu Hasan from Hyderabad where he had been hiding. “Razi confessed and said that he never imagined that the case would be opened after all these years,” investigating inspector Dharmendra Kumar Gupta told TOI.

The police revealed that the brothers had raped the victim when she was 12 years old. After 28 years, based on the complaint of the victim’s son, Shahajahanpur registered a case against the accused on March 4, 2021, and started investigating the case. After a lot of effort, the police managed to crack the case and arrested the accused.

Speaking about the case, Shahjahanpur SSP, S Anand said, “The crime came to my notice after the FIR was registered on March 4, 2021, on the court’s orders. We didn’t have the complete names of the accused and their addresses were not confirmed either. It was quite an old case but the complaint looked genuine. We wanted to help the woman get justice as she had suffered a lot in her childhood. After an extensive follow-up, we managed to identify the accused brothers and found them living freely in the Haddaf area of the city.”

Anand stated that when authorities confronted the accused, they claimed they had never met the survivor. As a result, the police decided to conduct a DNA test. In July 2021, samples were sent to a lab, and the results which were obtained in April 2022 turned out to be positive. The results concluded that one of the accused Mohammad Razi was the biological father of the victim’s son. Cops immediately secured a warrant from the court to arrest the duo, but they had already fled by then.

“Since we were very close to solving the case, we deployed multiple teams and sent them to various locations in search of the absconding brothers. The role of the surveillance team was important in finding the locations of the two men, which was not an easy task after so many years,” the SSP said.

According to reports, the incident dates back to the year 1994. Mohammad Razi and Naqi were the victim’s family acquaintances. Taking advantage of her family’s trust in them, the duo raped her several times and impregnated her at the age of 12.

After the child was born, the accused reportedly compelled the victim to give up her son for adoption and warned her not to register an FIR.

In 2021, the survivor’s son found his mother and persuaded her to seek justice. On March 4, 2021, an FIR was lodged in Shahjahanpur pursuant to court directives.

References:

opindia.com