8-yr-old's testimony nails father's killer

Testimony by an eight-year-old boy nailed his father’s killer and helped a local court in Faizabad district to sentence him to life imprisonment.

Shivakant helped the district court to establish the guilt of the accused – his uncle.

According to police sources, the accused Sunil Kumar had hacked to death his elder brother Ravindra Kumar in February 2010 after the latter refused to allow him to sell their ancestral land at Saidkhanpur.

He had buried the body in the field and told everyone that Sunil had left for some big city. Sunil's wife had gone to visit her parents at that time, sources said.

Police recovered the body a fortnight later.

The boy was the only witness who had last seen his father with his uncle.

“I saw my father and uncle in the fields. They were talking. Papa never returned home after that,” the boy testified in the court.

“When I asked my uncle in the evening about my father, he told me that papa had gone to town in search of some job,” he told the court.

The boy also said his uncle had got his and his brother’s heads shaved soon after the death of his father.

Prosecution counsel Naeem Safwi said the testimony of the boy helped to establish the fact that his father had been hacked to death by the accused.

“But for the testimony of the boy, it would have been very difficult to prove the guilt of the accused beyond all reasonable doubt,” he said.