MUMBAI, 19 January 2008 — A Mumbai sessions court yesterday found 12 Hindu men guilty of gang-raping a pregnant Muslim woman and killing 14 others, including her relatives, during Gujarat religious riots in March 2002.
Their sentences will be announced Monday. All 12 sobbed when Mumbai Sessions Court Judge U.D. Salvi read out the verdict, and said they would appeal the convictions in a higher court.
“We were not involved in the rape,” said Ramesh Chandan, one of the defendants.
The protracted trial of the “Bilkis Bano” case is seen as key to winning justice for victims of one of India’s worst religious riots. Human rights groups say about 2,500 people, most of them Muslims, were hacked, beaten or burned to death in the western state of Gujarat after 59 Hindu activists were burned alive when their train car caught fire in February 2002. Hindu groups and political parties accused a Muslim mob of setting fire to the car, but an investigation carried out by the Indian Railways later said the fire was accidental and probably set by kerosene stoves carried aboard by the Hindu passengers.
Judge Salvi acquitted seven other defendants, including five policemen and a husband-and-wife doctor team.
Eleven of the convicted men face possible death sentences for gang-rape, murder and conspiracy in the case. The 12th, a policeman, was found guilty of fabricating and destroying evidence and faces up to 10 years in prison.
Bilkis Yakub, then 21 and pregnant, was gang-raped along with her young daughter and another relative on March 3, 2002.
Yakub’s daughter and the relative were among the 14 people killed when a mob attacked them with stones, swords and iron rods as they fled their village in Gujarat.
In 2004 the Supreme Court moved the “Bilkis Bano case” trial to the neighboring state of Maharashtra in response to pleas that a fair trial was impossible in Gujarat, ruled by the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party.
Officials say 4,252 riot-related cases were registered in Gujarat, but police in the state dropped more than 2,000 for lack of evidence.
Salvi said evidence from the Central Bureau of Investigation helped decide the case. He said Yakub’s testimony and the eyewitness account of a boy who was 8 years old when the incident took place were also factors in the decision.
