Hathras gangrape, murder case: UP court convicts main accused, acquits 3 others

The 20-year-old Dalit woman had died at a Delhi hospital a fortnight after she was allegedly gang-raped at her village in Hathras. Three men accused were acquitted by a court in Uttar Pradesh on Thursday while the main suspect was convicted of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, officials said.

An SC/ST court on Thursday acquitted three people accused in the Hathras rape-murder case and held another one guilty. All the four accused – Sandeep (20), Ravi (35), Luv Kush (23), and Ramu (26) – were produced before the court. Ramu, Luv Kush, and Ravi were cleared by the judge in the case, but Sandeep, the main defendant, was found guilty.

The case concerns the alleged rape of a Dalit woman by four men from an upper caste on September 14, 2020, in Hathras. On September 29, while receiving care at Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital, she passed away.

She asserted in her statement to the police that she was pulled by her dupatta into the fields from a location where she and her mother and sibling had been mowing the grass. Her family was locked up in their house while she was cremated by the district administration in the middle of the night in her village, leading to allegations of a cover-up and widespread criticism of the Yogi Adityanath administration.

In horrific signs of torture, the woman had suffered multiple fractures and a gash in her tongue, drawing parallels to the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape. The four accused had tried to strangle her to death as she resisted their rape attempt and in the process, she also ended up biting her tongue and suffering a severe cut on it.

Massive demonstrations followed the Hathras gangrape case after the victim's family claimed police had taken the woman's corpse from the hospital without their consent and cremated it in the middle of the night.