Uttarakhand man sentenced to 30 years rigorous imprisonment for raping his minor children

Dehradun: A 45-year-old man in Champawat was on Tuesday sentenced to 30 years rigorous imprisonment for raping his two minor daughters and a minor son.

Delivering the sentence, judge Anuj Kumar Sangal of the POCSO (protection of children from sexual offences) court in Champawat also imposed a fine of Rs 1.25 lakh on the convict who hails from Nepal.

Each of the three children will get Rs 40,000 out of this amount, government counsel Vidyadhar Joshi said.

The survivors include two daughters aged 15 and 13 years and a 10-year-old son.

Joshi said the man, who used to work as a labourer, lived alone with his children. His wife had left him as he often came home drunk and beat her up. The man sexually assaulted the children repeatedly and threatened to kill them if they disclosed it to anyone.

The matter came to light when the daughters fled home and police found them wandering in Banbasa police station area.

When the police tried to take them home, they expressed their reluctance to go back saying their father came home drunk and beat them.

Police then took them to a shelter home for children. While living there, they recounted the ordeal to Manju Pandey, the in-charge of anti-human trafficking cell, Banbasa unit.

The man was subsequently arrested and his 10-year-old son taken to a shelter home in Haridwar, Joshi said.

The accused, who has been lodged at Almora jail since September 2021, was held guilty by the POCSO court under different sections of the Indian Penal Code and POCSO Act. This included 376(2) (f) (n) which deals with rape by someone who holds a position of trust or authority towards the woman; 376(3) (rape of woman aged less than 16 years); 376-AB of IPC (punishment for rape on woman under twelve years of age); 323 (deals with the punishment for voluntarily causing hurt); 504 (intentional insults that are intended or known to provoke a breach of the public peace or the commission of another offense and 506 (criminal intimidation).