The Delhi High Court has acquitted a man, who in 2014 was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment for raping a woman after confining her in a house for nine months, noting that the case was filled with “inconsistencies and improbabilities”.
Justice C. Hari Shankar said the man should be released from jail forthwith unless his incarceration was required in any other case.
Woman’s charge
According to the prosecution, the woman had alleged that in 2012, when she was travelling in a train and went to the washroom, the man threatened to kill her family and covered her mouth with a handkerchief, after which she became unconscious.
On regaining consciousness, she found herself in a room where the man allegedly used to administer her drugs, beat her and repeatedly raped her for nine months.
‘Friends also involved’
The woman alleged that two of the man’s friends, with faces covered, had also raped her.
The High Court, in its judgment, said there were several questions which remained unanswered, including as to how the man managed, in a crowded train compartment, to make the woman unconscious by covering her mouth with a handkerchief, with no one raising an alarm.
The court said it was admitted by the woman that she had visited a shop with the man to purchase a television set and it was bought as per her choice. “These facts too militate against the allegation of continuous physical assault and rape, by the appellant [man], of the prosecutrix [woman],” it said.
“It is inherently unbelievable that she would neither inform any of the other tenants in the building about what was transpiring, nor would any of the tenants become aware of the fact that she was being subjected to rape and physical assault on a daily basis,” it said.
